Nixon's Wedding Was Here

On June twenty-first, nineteen forty, Richard Nixon married Thelma Patricia Ryan at the Mission Inn, in the room now called the Presidential Lounge. He was a twenty-seven-year-old attorney from Whittier, practicing law with a local firm three years after passing the bar. She was a schoolteacher from Artesia who went by Pat. They had been introduced at a community theater rehearsal two years earlier. He proposed on their first date, which she declined. He kept asking. After the ceremony the couple honeymooned in Mexico before settling in Whittier.

The hotel that Frank Miller spent fifty-five years building hosted the beginning of one of the stranger American political careers of the twentieth century. Nixon would lose the California governor's race in nineteen sixty-two, tell the press they would not have him to kick around anymore, and be elected President six years later. He resigned in disgrace in nineteen seventy-four. He was born in Yorba Linda, forty miles west of here. He is buried there.

The chapel still hosts weddings. The tile work is unchanged. The inn also hosted presidents Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft, became a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy seven, and keeps a Garden of Bells with more than eight hundred bells, one of them dating to twelve forty seven.