Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work. Vernon L. Kellogg
necessities of the situation, and come on early to Stanford for a little special coaching, he might consider his probabilities for admission to the university so high as to be reckoned a sure thing.
Well, it all turned out as desired by both candidate and examiner. And Herbert Hoover was enrolled the following October among the first students, the "pioneer class" of Stanford University, and was actually the first Stanford student to inhabit the beautiful great new dormitory called Encina Hall. It was not only his university of dreams come true, but it was really to be the university of his graduation, the alma mater of a boy without any other mother. And it was the university of which he was to become, in later successful years, a patron and trustee. Stanford did much for Herbert Hoover; but so has he done much for Stanford.
Any university means many things, for all their lives, to those who have come timidly and wonderingly to its doors as boys and girls, and have gone out on that final day of happy reward and tearful good-byes as men and women eager to try themselves against the world outside of sheltered school-rooms. And most of these things are to most persons who have known them, things of pleasant and loving memory.
Stanford is like any other university in this relation to its graduates. But there seems to be something unusually strong and yet at the same time unusually intangible in the ties that bind its former students to it. Perhaps the explanation lies as much in the special character of its students, at least its pioneer ones, as in the special character of the institution itself. The students who came to Stanford in its earlier years came because it was different from other colleges, and because they did this it is likely that they themselves were different from other students. Like the restless, seeking pioneers that came over the desert and mountains to the Pacific Coast to find a different life from that of worn tradition and old ways, their descendants and the later coming youth, who had mixed with them and been infected by their seeking spirit, flocked to this institution that offered a different kind of college atmosphere.
Its low-arcaded quadrangle of mission buildings of yellow stone and heavy red tiles, nestling under high hills that run back to mountains, surrounded by wide grain fields flecked with rounded live-oaks and tall strange eucalyptus trees, and neighbored by great barns and well-kept paddocks and exercising tracks in which sleek trotting horses of famous Palo Alto breeding lounged or trained, was a strange new setting for studying Greek and Latin and mathematics and science.
"Die Luft der Freiheit weht" is the Stanford motto; and there was truly no more likely place for the winds of freedom to blow than over and through this college on a California ranch. And its founders did well to find for its first head a man than whom no other American scholar had given clearer indications of being anxious to break with clogging scholastic tradition.
The university itself, so tenderly conceived as a memorial to a boy lost to his parents, and so generously established as an opportunity for other boys, some of whom, like the hero of our story, might have had their parents lost to them, is an almost unique example of a great educational institution maintained by the fortune of a single family. All of the Stanford millions are returned today to the country in which they were accumulated in the form of a great endowment and of the beautiful halls in which thousands of students have found a free training for independent existence and right citizenship. These students wear the Stanford cardinal as a red badge of obligation, not anarchy. No other college in the country had more of its sons and daughters, in proportion to their total number, devoting themselves to their country's service during the Great War. If Herbert Hoover was the most distinguished of the serving sons of Stanford he was not more eager and devoted than many others.
But we leave Our Hero waiting too long upon the threshold of his dream university come true. It had been agreed, you remember, between young Hoover and his friendly examiner in Portland that the candidate for admission should come to the Stanford Farm—which is the students' name for the campus, and which literally described it in those beginning days—before the time of the opening of the university to be coached in the two or three studies in which his preparation was deficient.
So he came down from the North a month before the announced time for opening, a lonesome boy without any friends at Stanford except the good Quaker professor of mathematics, and with all of his savings from the "real estate business" tucked away in an inside pocket. They amounted in grand total to about two hundred dollars.
It was less simple getting to Stanford in those first days than it is now. There was not even a beginning then of the beautiful thriving town of Palo Alto that stands today with convenient railway station, just at the entrance to the long palm-lined avenue that runs straight up to the main university quadrangle. It was all grain field then, part of the great Hopkins estate, where now the college town welcomes the annually incoming Freshmen, and offers them convenient lodging places of all grades of comfort and quick trams and motor busses to the university.
Young Hoover had to get off at Menlo Park, the station for a few great country houses of California railway and bonanza kings, which offered no welcome for small boys with a few saved dollars in their inside pockets. He had to find a casual hackman to carry him and his bag and trunk to the university a couple of miles away. But even there he found no place yet ready to house him. So someone advised him to go to Adelanta Villa, a mile or more back from the university, in the hills, where a number of the early arrivals among the men of the new faculty were living. And there he did go, and found a warm and simple welcome and hospitality. He was soon ensconced in the old mansion and doing odd jobs about the establishment to help pay for his board and lodging.
Between jobs he was feverishly at work on the finishing touches for his final entrance tests, and probably quite as feverishly worrying about them. He felt pretty safe on everything but the requirements in English composition. As a matter of fact, when he came to that fearful test he ignominiously failed in it, and, indeed, did not finally get the required credit in it until nearly ready to graduate! But he was passed in enough of the entrance requirements to be given Freshman standing, "conditioned in English," a phrase not unfamiliar to other college students. He had, however, added something to his score by a Hooverian tour de force.
Noting that a credit was offered in physiology, about which he knew nothing technically, he reasoned that as everyone, of course, knew already a little something about his insides and how they worked, one ought to be able to find out a little more from some textbook, and that the two littles might make enough for passing purposes. Thereupon with that prompt and positive reaction to stimulus which has been conspicuously characteristic of him all his life, he got a book, read it hard all of the day and night before the examination—and passed in physiology!
The story of Herbert Hoover's college life reveals no startling features to distinguish it from the college careers of other thousands of boys, endowed with intelligence, energy, and ambition, but not with money, and hence forced to earn their living as they went along. Nevertheless it does reveal many of the main characteristics that we know so well today. For he did things all through those four years in the same way that he does them today, promptly, positively, and quietly. They were mostly already done before it was generally recognized that he was doing them.
His two hundred dollars could not last long even in a college of no tuition fees and an unusually simple student life. He had to earn his way all the time, and he earned it by hard work, directed, however, by good brains. Many a story, most interesting but, unfortunately, mostly untrue, has been told of his various expedients to earn the money necessary for his board and lodging, clothes, and books. Not a few of these stress his expertness as waiter in student dining-rooms. Undoubtedly he would have been an expert waiter if he had been a waiter at all. But he was not. A famous San Francisco chef has often been quoted in interesting detail as to the "hash-slinging" cleverness of the future American food controller in the dining-room which this chef managed—by the way, just after Hoover left college—in the great Stanford dormitory in those early days. But, though interesting, these details are mythical. As are also the accounts of the care he took of professorial gardens, although that would have been an excellent substitute for the outdoor exercise and play which he found little time for in college except in geological field excursions and camps. Nor was he ever nurse to the professorial babies, which also has been often placed to his credit by imaginative story-tellers.
For