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Informal Remarks to a Group of Senior Citizens From Whittier, California.
October 2, 1973

I JUST wanted to say to all of you from my hometown and my home community that as members of the press here will know, there are literally hundreds of groups like this in Washington today. As a matter of fact, thousands, who come-not just senior citizens but visitors—on bus trips and train trips and plane trips and so forth, and of course, want to tour the White House. Most of them get to tour the White House if they stay long enough. The lines are pretty long now. And most of them, of course, would like to come in and see the President.

Well, naturally, if I saw all the groups that came into town, I wouldn’t get any work done. You see how clean my desk is. But I can assure you that when I.learned that the group was from Whittier, you came in.

I think of my days there in high school and college, as a young lawyer, and then running for the Congress, living there. Tricia was born in Whittier, you know, Murphy Memorial Hospital. As I think back on those years—you know, I have now traveled all of the 50 States and more than 50 countries, in fact, more countries than anybody who has ever been in this office—but there is really nothing that means so much as seeing people from home.

Jim Farley, you know, the great chairman of the Democratic National Committee, once told me, he said, "You know, the most important thing in politics is to be able to win your own precinct," and we have always done rather well in Whittier.

But apart from winning it or losing it, I know that the letters we receive here, so many are from Whittier and our friends there, Yorba Linda and Fullerton, La Habra, all the places that I remember so well.

Let me say, too, that when I noted senior citizens on a bus trip of this length, I just think, who thought up the idea? Well, it is just a wonderful idea. I can remember when I was in Whittier—and to go to Washington, of course, to even think of the possibility, but here you are traveling the whole country and seeing the great parks, and you are going south next, I understand. It will be beautiful. Have you seen the fall leaves?

I remember my mother—of course, my mother, as you know, was born in Indiana. Most Californians are from some other State, but the thing that she and my father, who was also born in the Midwest, in Ohio—and they were both from farms—they always missed was the fall colors.

I took a little ride yesterday with General Haig down through Virginia. We didn’t have much time for this, because we just go in the car and work a bit, and already while going south, the colors aren’t as brilliant as they will be a month from now. If you go further north, they are pretty good right now, but you will find the colors very beautiful and something we don’t have in California. We have almost everything else, though.

Let me say finally that Mrs. Nixon, as you know, Pat—as a matter of fact, this is one of the few crowds that comes in here and you call me Dick; my mother used to call me Richard, and I appreciate that, too—but Pat will be over in the White House, and she is going to have you for coffee in a very famous room. It is called the Yellow Oval Room. In fact, the mark of the White House is oval rooms. This is an oval office, and the Yellow Oval Room is a room that the visitors do not get to see, that is, the regular tourists, because it is on the second floor of the family rooms, and it is one of the most beautiful rooms in the whole White House. It is where the state visitors come and are received by the President before going down to the big state dinners. So when you are up there, just remember that coming as you do from Whittier, you are all going to be either a king or a queen.

NOTE: The President spoke at 10: 15 a.m. in the Oval Office at the White House, where he received a group of more than 40 senior citizens, who were on a 35-day tour of the United States.