Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) is best known as being the 31st President of the United States (1929-1933). However, prior to that, he was a successful mining engineer, humanitarian, and administrator. He had the longest retirement of any U.S. President and died 31 years after leaving office, during the administration of Lyndon Johnson — his fifth successor.

Education

In the fall of 1891 Hoover attended the new Leland Stanford Junior University at Palo Alto, California. Cutting a wider swath outside the classroom than in, Hoover managed the baseball and football teams, started a laundry, and ran a lecture agency. Teaming up with other poor boys against campus swells, the reluctant candidate was elected student body treasurer on the "Barbarian" slate, then wiped out a student-government debt of $2,000.

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1891 - Leland Stanford Junior University - Palo Alto, California

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Hoover earned his way through school by doing typing chores for Professor John Casper Branner, who also got him a summer job mapping the terrain in Arkansas' Ozark Mountains. It was in Branner's geology lab that he met Lou Henry, a banker's daughter born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1874. Lou shared her fellow Iowan's love of the outdoors and self-reliant nature. "It isn't so important what others think of you as what you feel inside yourself", she told college friends.

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John Casper Branner - Arkansas - Ozark Mountains - Geology - Lou Henry - Waterloo - Iowa

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Hoover graduated in May 1895, three months before his 21st birthday. He left Stanford with $40 in his pocket and no prospects for employment. But from this college in a hayfield he had derived much more than a degree in geology. Stanford gave Hoover an identity, a profession, and a future bride. Most of all, Stanford became for the orphan from West Branch a surrogate family--a place to belong.

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In 1899 he married his Stanford sweetheart, Lou Henry Hoover and they had 2 sons. They went to China, where he worked for a private corporation as China's leading engineer. In June 1900 the Boxer Rebellion caught the Hoovers in Tianjin. For almost a month the settlement was under heavy fire. While his wife worked in the hospitals, Hoover directed the building of barricades, and once risked his life rescuing Chinese children.

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1899 - Lou Henry Hoover - China - June - 1900 - Boxer Rebellion - Tianjin

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Between 1907 and 1912, Lou and Hoover combined their talents to create a translation of one of the earliest printed technical treatises: Georg Agricola's De re metallica, originally published in 1556. At 670 pages with 289 woodcuts, the Hoover translation remains the definitive English language translation of Agricola's work.

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1907 - 1912 - Georg Agricola - 1556 - Woodcuts

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