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On the 160-acre corn-hog farm that Nels gave to his son William, Leo Hoegh was born on March 30, 1908. Brought up in a strict Danish Lutheran household, he did not learn to speak English until he was six years old. One of his first teachers remembers that she had to tell him not to work so hard in school. To earn pocket money, he set up a shoeshine stand in front of the theater in Elk Horn (present pop. 570), charged 5¢ for regular shines and 10¢ if there was manure on the shoes. At the Pottawattamie County courthouse, in nearby Council Bluffs, Leo watched entranced as lawsuits were tried, and one locally famed trial lawyer became his hero. That was when he decided what he wanted to be. "I liked what he could do for people," says Leo. "I guess that's when the lawyering bug got me." He went to the University of Iowa in the spiked-near-beer era, had his share, became a campus political manipulator, and was elected to the elite A.F.I. (All For Iowa) in recognition of all-round achievement. During the summers he fished out 30 distressed swimmers as a lifeguard at the posh Hotel Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo., and got a precinct worker's view of Iowa selling aluminum kitchenware door to door. He graduated from the University of Iowa College of Law in 1932, when the racking pains of the Depression were reaching their peak.
Only the year before, his father, who was president of the Farmers Savings Bank in Elk Horn, lost everything he had. As the Depression grew worse, William Hoegh sold all his assets and poured the money into the bank, but he could not save it. Despite the elder Hoegh's great personal sacrifice, there are some voters in the area who still hold the bank's fail ure against the Hoegh family. It is one of those anthills of state politics.
Nickel Breakfast. In those lean years Leo Hoegh started practicing law, often beginning his day with a 5¢ breakfast of a glass of milk and a roll and just as often managing to spend no more than 50¢ a day for all his meals. "Were things tough then?" he says. "Oh, my God, they were tough. Most of my practice was saving farms from foreclosure, getting the mortgage cut down and taking what the farmer could pay as a fee, which wasn't much. But I think I saved quite a few farms, and made quite a few friends."
He settled in Chariton (1956 pop. 5,700), 45 miles southeast of Des Moines. Like all good lowans, he joined every organization in sight—the Gun Club, the Rotary Club, the Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Pythias, Chamber of Commerce and the Methodist Church (there was no Lutheran Church in Chariton), built a reputation as a civic organizer and as a Republican worker. The almost inevitable next step came in 1936, when he stumped Lucas County to win election to the state legislature. During the campaign he also wooed and won dimpled Mary Louise Foster, director of the Methodist choir. .("Leo would be up at 6 o'clock, shake hands with 600 farmers during the day, and be on my front porch by 7:30 p.m. sharp.")
Building a solid, orthodox reputation as an unrelenting penny pincher, Leo Hoegh pleased his constituents, twice won reelection. Then came the event that sent Leo Hoegh heading south into the Army and sent many an orthodoxy galley-west: World War II.