Yorba Linda’s ‘Gracious’ Motto Being Put to the Test : Hometown: Despite crowds and chaos, few would pass on the chance to pay final tribute to one of their own.

For a long time, Yorba Linda was a tiny town of avocado trees and lemon groves. In the past 10 years, it started to boom. On Tuesday, it exploded.

“The noise, the compressors, the sirens, the sound checks, the helicopters, the hammering. They’ve been going at it all night,” Russ Watroba said, having just that morning engaged in a nasty spat with looky-loos as he tried to put his trash cans on the curb.

This little enclave of horses and trees and low crime and no graffiti (almost) finds itself in the eye of a storm of media and mourners and rubbernecks and police as preparations to bury Yorba Linda’s native son, Richard Milhous Nixon, continue.

To be honest, all the commotion is getting to be rather a pain in the birthplace; homeowners can’t go to the market for milk without being asked to show proof of residency to go home again. The helicopters are waking up babies. The dogs won’t stop barking at all the invaders and there is no place to park. And Yorba Linda wouldn’t trade places with any other city in the world.

“It’s a hassle,” Brian Gibson said, as he mulled over the increasingly appealing idea of getting out of town when the real hordes converge today. “But how often does this happen? I might as well stick around and say six Presidents were 100 yards from my house on a single day.”

They call Yorba Linda the “Land of Gracious Living” and never has a motto been more tested. Cars filled with strangers prowl up and down residential streets searching for a place to park. The merchants on Main Street spent most of Tuesday morning shooing non-customers out of their spaces and watching woefully as customers drove impatiently away. There were shouting matches in the streets.

“I’ve given up,” Leo Reilly, owner of the Yorba Linda Hardware store--where a young Richard Nixon once swept floors for pocket money--said in disgust. “I told one lady this is a 15-minute parking space. She waited a minute then got out of her car and left.”

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace is surrounded by quaint California bungalows and mom-and-pop businesses where people take pride in being welcoming and friendly. This is a Quaker town, where grandsons live across the street from their grandmothers and the birds sing joyfully in the trees.

So how come Carol Sasaki found herself leaping from her car Monday as she fought to turn right off of her beloved Park Place Street to pick up her son from school, hollering at the barricade of cars that refused to let her pass, “Do you know how rude you are?”

“There is just no privacy,” said one resident, who has taken to putting on a pair of pants when he gets out of bed. “You can’t walk through the house at night with a light on without somebody looking in.”

If all of this was not imposition enough, there was talk of shooting off some kind of cannon. Rootless Southern California has never been much for protocol, but Washington is the brains behind this operation, and according to the rules set out by the U.S. Military District of Washington, the death of an ex-President is grounds for all sorts of tribute, including the firing of one gun every half-hour from dawn to dusk, a 21-gun salute fired at one-minute intervals during the funeral ceremony, and a 50-gun salute fired at five-second intervals when the burial is complete.

Who knows what could happen? Yorba Linda can only be thankful that the ancient tradition of sacrificing a horse at a military funeral has somewhere fallen by the wayside.

Still, it’s been a long time since anything so exciting happened to such a tiny place, and the residents were abuzz. Let’s face it, the laying to rest of the 37th President of the United States is big stuff, and this one promised to attract four ex-Presidents and one current one, several international dignitaries, media from around the world and Nixon devotees, some who traveled from across the country at great personal expense ($4,000 for a family of three from Washington to Orange County) just to pay their last respects to a man they figure was long past due for some.

The magnificence of it all was not wasted for a minute on Jenny Fae Sprague, who sat in her son’s back yard, a stone’s throw from the little white house where Nixon was born 81 years ago. She was sitting in a lawn chair with an Instamatic camera in one hand and her grandson’s dog, Booger, in the other.

Booger had the run of the grassy yard until Monday when his owner, 23-year-old Jamie Rice, gave ABC News in New York permission to erect a four-story metal scaffold in his back yard. As his grandmother was busy making a photographic record of the emerging scaffold, Rice was dragging two big trash cans into the street to save a coveted parking space for an ABC reporter.

“It’s exciting,” Rice said, smoking one of the five packs of Camels he purchased Monday so as not to have to go to the store in all this traffic. “Also, there was a little bit of money involved.”

Ahhhh. So there is more than fame to be gained from all this pomp and ceremony.

For all the nuisance, some of the Yorba Linda business community and a few of its enterprising residents were more than pleased to welcome the world to their tiny doorstep.

As long as they were going to be overrun, John Hansen and Jason Moquin, who live across the street from the library, figured they’d try to make a buck. After all, Nixon was a capitalist, wasn’t he? They and their neighbors sold parking spots in their driveways for $10 a pop. Moquin made some extra money by getting one taker at the television van rate of $100.

“Nixon was a fan of free enterprise,” Hansen, a sales manager, pointed out, as his three children scurried around the front yard awaiting the motorcade. “This is providing a service.”

Laurie Crisp, store manager of the local McDonald’s Restaurant, reported that business was better than brisk. The Air Force Band, about 40 of them, showed up for breakfast Tuesday morning in uniforms so new the manager had to cut the tag off one of them.

Indeed, the anticipation seemed to undercut the sadness this community felt when word of Nixon’s death came Friday. If the rest of the country had deigned to forgive its most disgraced President, Yorba Linda had never blamed him. So, it seemed fitting that the town that produced, nurtured and helped rehabilitate him would also give him a proper tribute one last time, all the traffic and noise be damned.

“We’ve watched him come in lots of times in helicopters. We were here for the opening of the library,” Kay Rogers, a retired kindergarten teacher at the Richard Nixon School, said as she tiptoed in mud to peek through the rails of a fence at the freshly dug grave, just a few feet from where Pat Nixon was laid to rest. “I think it’s wonderful he’s getting his due.”