About 100 Yorba Linda municipal workers had the day off today as the city celebrated the 77th birthday of former President Richard M. Nixon, whose rise to political fame will soon be documented in a presidential library.

Nixon, who now lives in New Jersey, was born in the tiny Orange County community on Jan. 9, 1913, in a farmhouse on what now is Yorba Linda Boulevard. The Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace, now under construction on the site, is expected to open July 19.

The 45,000-square-foot, $20-million Spanish-style building, though, will not contain any of the presidential papers collected while Nixon was President because the federal government seized the material--44 million pages and about 4,000 hours of audiotape--when he tried to have them destroyed in the aftermath of Watergate, the scandal that forced him to resign in disgrace.