Herbert Hoover: The Man and His Work. Vernon L. Kellogg
After failing regularly at each semester's trial principally, he thinks (and Mrs. Hoover is inclined to agree), because he always had to take it under a particularly meticulous instructor, his predicament began to worry even his professors in the geology department. It looked as if their star student might not be allowed to graduate. Finally a date was set by the English department for a last trial before the end of his Senior year.
A day or two before this date the professor of paleontology, J. P. Smith, famed not only for his erudition but for his especial kindness to all geology students—especially if they did well in paleontology—came to the worrying Senior with a paper that Hoover had written sometime before on a paleontological subject, and said to him: "Look here, you will never pass that examination in the state you are in. Take this paper; it's fine. Copy it in your best hand; remember that handwriting goes a long way with professors of English; look up every word in the dictionary to be sure you have got the right one; then put in all the punctuation marks you ever saw, and bring it back to me." Hoover did it.
Then Professor Smith disappeared with the paper in his study, but soon came out with it, abundantly blue-penciled. "Now take it and re-copy it with all these indicated changes, and bring it back again." Again the interested Senior obeyed his mentor. Then the professor left the laboratory with the paper in his hand. Hoover awaited his return with ever-increasing interest. Pretty soon he came back with a cheerful smile, handed Hoover the paper, and said: "Well, you've passed; although you probably don't deserve it."
Professor Smith, it seems, had carried the paper, not to the fatal instructor, but to the head of the English department and had said to him: "See here; your instructor is holding up the best man we have from graduating. Now look at this paper of Hoover's. Is there anything the matter with it? Doesn't it make good sense? Isn't it well written? Isn't it well punctuated?"
The English head glanced over it impatiently—he was translating Dante, his dearest recreation, at the moment—and then roared out: "Well, it looks all right. I suppose Instructor X has to live up to the rules, but if the boy can do this well for you it's good enough for us." And with his Dante pencil he wrote a large "Passed" across the paper.
Someway all this does not sound like an account of life at the conventional university. Nor does Professor J. P. Smith, who used to interrupt his lecture to wake up a dozing student with a sharp but kindly "Here, Jack, wake up, this is an important point and I will surely ask about it in examination," seem to be of the conventional type of professor. And most Freshmen coming to Yale or Harvard would hesitate a little before taking the advice of some workman about the campus to go, with bag and trunk, in search of board and lodging to a house full of professors.
But as I said at the beginning, Stanford was different. It is precisely because it was, that Hoover's particular college experiences and acquisitions were what I have tried to suggest, and not what you might think they would be from your knowledge of other universities. And while Stanford has converged somewhat with years toward the more usual university type—colleges get more alike as they get older—it has still an atmosphere peculiarly its own. But it was in the first days that this atmosphere was so very distinctive. Its president and faculty and students, all living closely together in the middle of a great ranch of seven thousand acres of grain fields, horse paddocks, and hills where jack rabbits roamed and coyotes howled, were thrown together into one great family, whose members depended almost entirely on one another for social life. And each department was a special smaller family within the great one. Life was simple and direct and democratic. Real things counted first and most; there was little sophistication. Work was the order of the day; recreations were wholesome.
The geology family was an especially close and happy one. Some of Dr. Branner's former assistants and students had followed him out to California. They were the older members of the family. Almost all of them are now well-known geologists and mining engineers. So also are many of his younger ones. The family went on long tramps and camps together. The region about Stanford is singularly interesting from a geologist's point of view; and in those days it was a terra more or less incognita. Everybody was discovering things. It was real live geology. Lectures and recitations were illustrated, not by lantern slides, but by views out of the window and revelations in the field.
And at the same time these young geologists learned real life; they had come to know intimately real men and women, all fired with the enthusiasm of a new venture, new opportunities, and a high ideal. With all this, Herbert Hoover learned, in particular, one additional very important thing. He learned that a certain unusual girl, beautiful, intelligent, and unspoiled, a lover of outdoors, and, as proof of her unusualness, a "major" student in geology, was the girl for him. Having learned this he decided to marry her. And later, she decided that he had decided right.
And so with all his experience at earning his living by organizing anything needing organizing, and with his stores of geological lore gained from lecture room and textbook and field work and close personal association with his able and friendly professors, and, finally, with the knowledge that he had already found exactly the right girl for him, Herbert Hoover went out from Stanford, in 1895, with his Pioneer Class, ready to open his oyster. But he had only himself to rely on in doing it.
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