Death of a Lady

3 minute read
TIME

Last week, in her apartment in Manhattan’s Waldorf Towers, Mrs. Herbert Hoover, 68, died of a heart attack.†

Like her husband, Lou Henry Hoover was Iowa-born; like him, she moved West at an early age. As a girl in Whittier, Calif., where her father was the town’s first banker, she was tall, lanky, not over-strong. On long camping trips in the mountains with her father, she learned to love nature; later, at Leland Stanford University, she majored in natural history.

A serious and intent student, she was discussing rock specimens in the laboratory with her professor one day when a serious, intent young man walked in. Said the professor: “Miss Henry thinks this rock belongs to the precarboniferous age.

What do you think, Hoover?” Student Hoover, a senior, disputed the freshman’s judgment. But he lingered to talk to her of other things.

Three years later. Herbert Hoover, then a young mining engineer in Australia, sped back to Palo Alto to marry Lou Henry. They spent their honeymoon on a ship to China, en route to his new job as director of China’s mines. Thereafter, for twelve years, Lou Henry Hoover made homes all over the world—Peking, Tientsin, Tokyo, Mandalay, Australia, St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), Paris, London. By the time her first son, Herbert Jr., was three years old he had been around the world three times.

First Lady. When the Hoovers moved into the White House in 1929, Lou Hoover was the most cosmopolitan First Lady of this century. She tore the executive mansion apart, refurbished it from top to bottom, much of it with the Hoovers’ own money. She entertained on a more lavish scale than any of her predecessors. In Forty-Two Years in the White House, Chief Usher Irwin (“Ike”) Hoover decribed a normal day’s schedule: “A large lunch, a tea or two, possibly one at four-thirty and another at five-thirty, and a dinner of from 18 to 26 covers in the evening.”

Her interest in the outdoors remained. Washingtonians watched her ride her spirited grey horse through Rock Creek Park; in the summers she took long pack-trips in the Western mountains. Long interested in the Girl Scouts, she became their national president. (The Scouts’ affectionate name for her: Buffalo.)

†Five wives of former Presidents are still living: Mrs. Thomas Jex Preston (the former Mrs. Grover Cleveland), 79, Mrs. Benjamin Harrison, 85, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, 82, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson (his second wife), 71, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, 65.

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