Ottumwa Days
A month after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II, 29-year-old attorney Richard Nixon signed up to do his part. He left his law practice in Whittier, California for a job at the Office of Emergency Management in Washington D.C. Then in June 1942, he received a commission of lieutenant junior grade in the U.S. Navy. Instead of keeping Nixon in Washington or sending him back to California, the Navy sent him to Ottumwa.
He arrived in Iowa that August, accompanied by his wife of two years, Pat. Nixon spent nine months at Ottumwa’s Naval Air Station (it closed two years after the end of the war, and the site is now the city’s airport). In May 1943, he was shipped out to the South Pacific, where Nixon served as a logistics officer. Nixon served honorably, but didn’t see much action. He did, however, make enough money playing poker with fellow officers to be able to open a new, bigger law office in La Habra, California after the war.
When Nixon died in 1994, the Des Moines Register sent a reporter to Ottumwa to gather local memories of him. For the most part, people said the sort of vague and nice things one says about the recently deceased, but Loree Roach, a retired journalist who knew the Nixons during their Ottumwa days, offered a more candid account of him.
“I don’t know how to say this without sounding unkind, but actually he didn’t leave much of an impression,” she said. “Nixon apparently was withdrawn and moody and not very outgoing. I don’t mean that to sound like there was anything wrong with him. But he was just not friendly.”
Pat was nice, though, Roach recalled. Everyone liked her.
Authoritarian Chic
One thing that becomes clear listening to the Nixon tapes is that the 37th president envied brutally repressive governments, especially the Soviet Union. Laws restrained him from crushing his dissenters, so Nixon never got to live out his gulag dreams. But in 1970, he dabbled in a bit of fascistic fashion.
Nixon directed the members of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service who guard the White House to change how they dress. He wanted their police-style uniforms replaced with something evoking a palace guard. Fancier. Militaristic. But the results were more comic opera than king’s guard.
“Teased in the press for adopting the costumes of a ‘banana republic,’ the president finally gave up and recalled the uniforms,” the White House Historical Association explains on its site.
They were put in storage for decades, before the Federal Surplus Division found a buyer for the “32 gaudy uniforms,” as United Press International described them. They ended up as the new high school marching band uniforms in the small northwestern Iowa town of Marcus.
“They will be fine for a band,” Thomas Roller, director of the Federal Surplus Division in Iowa, told the UPI. “But they did have sort of a Nazi connotation when they came out and that offended some people.”
A Poorly Aged Idea
Lots of cities have schools named for presidents. Cedar Rapids has 14, but nearby Hiawatha has one that’s almost entirely unique, because Hiawatha is home to Richard M. Nixon Elementary School.
It must have seemed like a good idea in 1969, when the name for the school was decided. Nixon was in the first year of his first term, and still had that new president smell. It probably still seemed like a good idea when the school opened its doors for the first time in 1970. But by the time Nixon gave his famous “I’m not a crook” speech in November 1973, it was pretty clear he wasn’t a great namesake for an elementary school.
When Nixon lied about not being a crook, there were only two schools named for him. There are still only two schools named for him. One is Hiawatha’s, the other is in Landing, New Jersey. It opened in 1969.
The New Jersey school doesn’t use the full name — just Nixon Elementary — allowing people to imagine it’s not named for that Nixon. But Hiawatha’s school kept the “Richard M.,” so there’s no doubt about whose name it is. Just doubts about whether it’s a good idea.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2024 issue.
