If he were a vacuum cleaner, he’d be number one. But. As presidents go, he ranked around 33rd overall. That’s the number I’ve loosely assigned after looking at all the different historical rankings of the presidents. None other than Herbert Hoover.
Today is Herbert Hoover’s birthday, having come into this world on August 10, 1874. He stayed on the planet for 90 years, turning in his life membership card on October 20, 1964.
During four of those years, he was President of the United States, from March 4, 1929, to March 4, 1933.
The timing was rough, what with the stock market crashing all to hell and the Great Depression gripping the country by the neck. All of this just after he stepped into office. Yet. There he was, in the driver’s seat. Most historians don’t give him very high marks for his efforts.
The dam is named for him. The vacuum cleaner is not.
You probably knew all of that, so here are a few things you may not have known about him.
He was the first president born west of the Mississippi River. Yes. It was nothing more than a two-room house in West Branch, Iowa. His father built the little place. West Branch was little too — a small prairie town of just 265 people. Herbert would not cross east of the Mississippi River until he was 22 years old. When he was little, he used to cross the muddy streets there and always got stuck. His father called him “his little stick in the mud.” Everyone else called him “Bertie.”
A great deal many of us are orphans by now. But Herbert Hoover became an orphan at age 9. Sadly, when he was just six years old, his father, Jesse, died of a heart attack during a bout with pneumonia. Then, about three years later, Hoover’s mother, Hulda, died from pneumonia and typhoid fever. He had two siblings — an older brother and a younger sister. The three were separated to live with Hulda’s various relatives. Herbert was put on a westbound Union Pacific train to live with Hulda’s brother in Newburg, Oregon.
As an adult, he found success in the fact that he was a self-made multi-millionaire. Hoover once said, “If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much.” Okay.
He graduated from Stanford in 1895 with a geology degree, and I should say he was in Stanford’s inaugural class. After school, Hoover took an engineering job with the British mining firm called Bewick, Moreing, and Company. And that is where he started making his wealth.
He traveled the world, finding lucrative mineral deposits. I guess he had a nose for those things. By the age of 27, he had become one of the firm’s four partners. He left the company in 1908, and it wasn’t long before he had profitable business interests on every continent except for Antarctica. As a note — he donated his presidential salary to charity.
And, speaking of charity, Hoover helped save millions from starvation after both World Wars. He had been accused of being callous to the millions of Americans forced onto bread lines during the Great Depression. But during those wars, he spearheaded efforts to feed in war-torn countries. Hoover was recognized around the world as such a great humanitarian that he was nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Finally, there is a sport that bears Hoover’s name. Hooverball. The White House physician wanted to keep Hoover fit, so he concocted a game played by the president and staff each morning on the south lawn. It goes like this. Two teams of two to four players would throw a 6-pound medicine ball over an 8-foot-high net. It was similar to tennis and scored the same, But, of course, the ball was thrown instead of hitting it with a racket. Today, a national Hooverball championship is held in Hoover’s birthplace of West Branch, Iowa, each year.
And that is some of the sum of Hoover.
Your serve.
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Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.
— Booker T. Washington
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Success is not a good teacher, failure makes you humble.
— Shah Rukh Khan
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Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
— Albert Einstein
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Hooverville. Hooverball. Hoover. Dam.
