Nixon did not come from money.

"You could literally say they were dirt poor," said Barbara Perry, a co-chair of the Miller Center Oral History Program at the University of Virginia.

Nixon's financial troubles stemmed from the failed lemon ranch his parents owned until 1922. His father then opened a combined grocery store and gas station in Whittier, Calif., where the entire family worked.

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Nixon would get up every morning before school to go into Los Angeles and check out the available produce selection, said historian Richard Norton Smith.

In 1930, Nixon enrolled in Whittier College, and later won a scholarship to Duke University's law school.