Nixon Day--Few Ruffles, Flourishes

The world might not notice, but Yorba Linda city workers will: Nixon Day is here again.

This weekend marks the 10th year the city has celebrated its most famous son by unilaterally declaring former President Nixon’s birthday a holiday. The problem is, hardly anyone knows.

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace will mark the president’s 87th birthday with a brass-band concert at 2 p.m. today. And municipal offices will be closed Monday, giving city employees the day off.

But banks will remain open, mail will be delivered and even the garbage will be picked up, since that service is performed by a private contractor.

So much for honoring dead presidents.

“I don’t think it affects us,” said Gary Springer, 41, of the YL Vacuum & Appliance shop, when told of the holiday. “I liked Nixon and can appreciate that it’s his birthday, but for me it’s not a big holiday.”

So Springer hasn’t planned a special Nixon barbecue at his house (suggested Nixon favorite: hamburgers with catsup). And he won’t watch a parade down Main Street because one hasn’t been scheduled. He’s not even offering special deals on tape-recorder repairs at his shop.

“I’ll probably just guard our parking lot and reserve space for our customers,” said Springer, who lives in Anaheim Hills. “When something goes on at the library, they come park in our lot.”

David Gruchow, assistant city manager, said about 100 city employees would be affected by the paid holiday, one of 12 days off employees receive each year. He said the number of holidays is consistent with those given to municipal employees elsewhere, and similar to giving government workers a day off in February to commemorate the births of Lincoln and Washington.

Of course, celebrating birthdays as holidays isn’t the only way Americans honor dead presidents.

There are the memorial libraries, which Nixon already has. And there are coins.

So far, though, Nixon’s famous ski-slope profile hasn’t been minted for public circulation.

Ed Quigley, a former teacher who runs Main St. Coins and Collectibles in Yorba Linda, said Nixon doesn’t stand a chance of bumping Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Washington or Kennedy from the lower-denomination coins.

That leaves the dollar coin, which currently carries suffragette Susan B. Anthony’s likeness. Her image is to be replaced in March with that of Sacajawea, the Shoshone who guided Lewis and Clark’s 1804-06 expedition across the North American continent.

Quigley said he can see Nixon as a contender for the coin the next time it’s redesigned, after five to seven years.

But Nixon’s standing nationwide isn’t quite what it is in Yorba Linda, where the details of his fall from power and subsequent resignation in 1974 are seen as an asterisk to a life rather than as a defining denouement. So unless Yorba Linda starts minting its own coins, the chances of people carrying Nixon around in their pockets are pretty slim.

Quigley blames politics: “I see Nixon the same as I see Clinton. They’ve done some outstanding things, but they’re human beings and their flaws have been magnified.”

Yet Nixon has also magnified Yorba Linda. Mike Ruocco, a bearded barber with long graying hair, remembers the day the world came to pay its respects at Nixon’s funeral, less than a mile from Yorba Linda’s preserved Main Street shopping district.

The lines were long that day and Ruocco had his barber shop to run, so he didn’t make it to the funeral. But Ruocco did nip to the corner to watch Clinton’s motorcade whiz by, one of those memories he’s filed away as interesting but not necessarily significant.

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Sort of like Nixon’s birthday.

Ruocco said his shop will be closed Monday, but that’s because he closes every Monday. He didn’t know Nixon’s birthday was looming and even if he did, he doubted he’d have planned anything special.

Still, the library is nearby and Nixon was a native son, so Ruocco keeps a memento of the funeral on a shelf high on the wall opposite his two barber chairs. It’s a small framed photo of Nixon draped with a black band, a gift from someone, he said.

The shop has a cozy feel, reminiscent of old-style barber stands with wood-paneled walls, razor strops and lots of opinions about local goings-on.

That’s the impression Ruocco intended when he built it 10 years ago next to his mother’s business, the Main Street Restaurant.

Sometimes, he said, tourists stop in looking for tangible connections to Nixon’s past beneath the grid of development that has sprawled over the area since Nixon’s childhood.

Ruocco doesn’t like to disappoint. “Because it’s an old-fashioned shop people come in and say, ‘Nixon must have had his hair cut in here,’ ” Ruocco said as he snipped away at the back of a customer’s head. “I just say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ ”