Huldah had entrusted a local Quaker attorney, Lawrie Tatum, respected for his scrupulous probity, to become legal guardian of the children should she die, and the probate court approved her choice. The family property was auctioned, and Tatum invested the revenue at 8 percent interest, to be preserved, if possible, for the children’s college education. Bertie’s share of the estate was $718.32, his sole financial resource between the ages of ten and twenty-one. All the relatives were young and none could afford to take in all three orphans, so the despondent children were apportioned among relatives in the West Branch area. May, age eight, was raised by Grandmother Minthorn. Tad, about fourteen, lived for a time with his uncle Merlin, then was taken in by his uncle Davis, who dwelled in a sod house and groomed the boy to become a yeoman farmer like himself. Bertie’s fourth-grade teacher, Mollie Brown, offered to adopt her favorite pupil, but the family council rejected Brown on the grounds that she was unmarried and worked full-time.27
Bertie was thus assigned to his uncle Allan, who owned a farm about two miles outside of West Branch, and had a son, Wally, near Bertie’s age, who became his cousin’s best friend. Allan was a subsistence farmer whose life was a constant struggle to meet payments on his mortgaged farm, with little remaining disposable cash. Bert adapted well, though he had to work harder than he had for his own parents. Together the family boiled soap, weaved carpets, refined sorghum into sugar, churned butter and cheese, canned fruits and vegetables, and made jam. The children helped to plant and harvest crops, feed the livestock, milk cows, and curry horses. Bert and Wally walked ten miles to the nearest forest to cut trees for firewood, diced them into smaller pieces, and carried them home in repeated trips. Allan paid the boys 1 cent per hundred for capturing potato bugs, 2 cents for cleaning out the barn, and 5 cents for each hundred thistles cut. Bertie never shirked the tedious work and enjoyed being outside. He liked his hardworking, good-humored uncle and would have been content to grow to maturity in this familiar and cheerful environment. Yet his odyssey was unfinished. His life had come to resemble The Pilgrim’s Progress, with similar challenges and segues. But like all challenges, it meant opportunity for growth.28
In the fall of 1885, Uncle Allan received a letter from Huldah’s brother, Dr. Henry John Minthorn, an erudite, versatile, devout man who was superintendent of Friends Pacific Academy in Newberg, Oregon. Minthorn’s son had died recently and he wished to adopt Bert, whom he could provide with a better education and superior vocational opportunities than were available at West Branch. The Hoover-Minthorn clan ruminated about uprooting the boy again, yet the educational argument clinched their decision. Eleven-year-old Bertie, who rarely cried, burst into tears. He was leaving everyone and everything he loved. He soon boarded an emigrant train, a barely spruced-up cattle car in which travelers had to supply their own food and bedding, for the seven-day, two-thousand-mile journey. With Aunt Millie’s repast of fried chicken, ham, bread, and meat pies, the apprehensive youngster was dispatched under the watchful eyes of Oliver Hammel and his emigrant family of West Branch Quakers. Hoover later reflected that the Minthorns were correct in believing that he could obtain a better education in the Far West, and without being transplanted, he would not have become the same man.29
Dr. Minthorn met Bertie at the train depot in Portland and they boarded a stern-wheeled steamer down the Willamette River to Newberg, a rustic Quaker trading post barely larger than West Branch. The orphan’s new home was a wonderland of virgin fir trees, which, clustered closely, shaded out the underbrush and created the canopy of an arched cathedral. The Willamette Valley was a place like none Bertie had seen, an enchanting frontier of beauty and mystery, permeated with a mild, inviting climate. The rivers were majestic, leaping with schools of silvery fish. If West Branch had been Utopia, this was Eden.30
John Minthorn had trekked west with his Quaker family to build a New Jerusalem in the green forests of Oregon. He settled on land near Newberg, where in 1885 he helped construct the Friends Pacific Academy he hoped would grow into a college—today called George Fox University. Minthorn was humorless and less indulgent than Uncle Allan, and he loathed wasted time. There was no devil in Minthorn’s workshop because there was no idleness. If Cedar County had stamped a work ethic onto Bertie, life in Oregon hammered it in on an anvil. Minthorn, the same man who had breathed life into Hoover when the boy lay dying of croup, was a dominant figure in the Quaker community. He managed a land company, was the town’s sole physician, and acted as superintendent at the academy where both he and his wife also taught. A devout Quaker, he possessed unusual drive and a vivid imagination, as did his protégé.
Bertie, now called Bert, worked arduously. Before school and on weekends, he watered and curried Minthorn’s ponies, fed the livestock, milked the cows, and split firewood. Once, after the boy forgot to water the animals, Minthorn wakened him after midnight and sent him scurrying to the pump. During the summer recess Bert helped Minthorn saw down trees, some of them four feet in diameter, then burn the stumps, wasting priceless timber in a headlong rush to till the virgin soil. Hoover swept and mopped the academy and, because Minthorn’s three daughters were too young to help, did household chores such as washing dishes and laundering clothes. Bert’s childhood had evaporated. Gone was much of the leisure of youth, the latitude to grow up slowly. Minthorn was hard yet not heartless, tolerant and fair, yet all business, habitually clad in drab Quaker colors. He further instilled a work ethic in Hoover, yet he admitted, “I do not think he was very happy.”31 He added, “Our home was not like the one he left with his own parents and almost no work.”32 Bert did not grumble, but neither did he beam.
If the weekdays were demanding, the Sabbath seemed downright grueling. Chores began at dawn, followed by the interminable observance in the meetinghouse, frequently in stoic silence. Then the family walked home in silent contemplation. Following a period of enforced meditation, there was a meeting of the Band of Hope in which the instructor depicted the damnation of an alcoholic by exhibiting graphic photographs of emaciated, broken-down hard drinkers. At home, Bert was expected to read a redeeming book before falling asleep exhausted. One Sunday he persuaded some of his cousins to skip Sunday school to go fishing. They accidentally tipped over the boat and returned covered with mud. The next day, the local Quakers prayed for twelve hours for the sinners. Yet Bert did not believe God frowned at him. “My God is a good, kind God,” he said privately.33
Minthorn was no ogre—quite the contrary. Beneath the stern exterior lay a gentle heart. He was unselfish and forgiving, possessing a superb mind, which he did not flaunt; he and Bert were, in fact, much alike. John possessed imagination, communication skills, and human empathy for his patients. Hoover concluded that Minthorn was “a severe man on the surface but like all Quakers kindly at the bottom.”34 Before he left Oregon, they had forged bonds that went beyond mere acceptance. Not the least of the lessons Bert partook of were self-discipline and sympathy for the world’s downtrodden. Though demanding, Minthorn was not cruel, and he could be generous. He treated the poor free of charge. As a young man Minthorn had driven a wagon on the Underground Railroad. He was a Quaker pacifist, yet with a caveat: he served in the Union Army as a surgeon and participated in the Battle of Shiloh. “Turn your other cheek once,” he told Bert, “but if he smites it, then punch him.”35
The physician invited his adopted son to ride his buggy with him when making house calls, and on these long rides he unwound and regaled the boy with exciting stories about his adventurous life, exhibiting the same low-voltage magnetism that would later be attributed to Hoover himself. Having served as a missionary and Indian agent among Native Americans in Oklahoma and Oregon, John had a strong sense of social justice. At Friends Pacific Academy, he taught not only physiology, drawn from his medical expertise, but history and literature, in which he was well-read. Intellectually, he was a cut above Hoover’s West Branch relatives and Bert’s own parents. Unlike Bert’s parents, Uncle John
believed in reading a variety of genres and could discuss national politics. He encouraged the young Hoover to delve into fiction, poetry, and classical literature, and he stocked Friends Pacific Academy and his home with an eclectic selection of books. The physician gave Bert his own room in their spacious home and respected his privacy. He had no objection to having fun, so long as chores were done first. Minthorn was a man of character, impeccably honest, who taught the youth valuable lessons from books and from life. He was resolute and organized and set priorities, all qualities Hoover took to heart.36
When land prices soared in 1888, Minthorn seized the opportunity to reap a quick profit by moving his land company to the town of Salem, the rapidly growing territorial capital. Hoover, now fourteen, moved with the family and became the office boy for the land company rather than completing high school. Bert quickly adapted to the world of business. “My boyhood ambition,” the orphan later explicated, “was to be able to earn my own living without the help of anybody, anywhere.”37 Life had forged a strong, determined, independent young man.
The new office boy quickly mastered the rudiments of typing, bookkeeping, and filing while striving to improve his writing skills, penmanship, and organizational abilities. The company grew, as did Hoover’s responsibilities. The boy bought and sold land, planted and cultivated orchards, constructed houses, and placed new settlers. The company built a church, school, and hotel; operated a sawmill, flour mill, and railroad; laid out streets; and installed sewers. Hoover was involved in all facets of this expansion. Hundreds of letters a week poured in, and he could locate any specific letter in less than a minute. He was placed in charge of advertising and drafted ads that appeared in a thousand Eastern newspapers, bringing hundreds of emigrants weekly to Salem. Bert met them at the train depot, found temporary quarters and food, showed them homes and lots, and demonstrated the potential for fruit orchards.38
Bert even participated in stockholders’ meetings. The young Hoover possessed vision; he knew the country was migrating west, that Oregon was a magnet and real estate seemed likely to soar. Salem had opened new horizons for Bert, and he thrived. The young entrepreneur enrolled in night school at a new business college in Salem. His instructor, finding him gifted at math, tutored him in algebra, geometry, and advanced arithmetic, and also in Latin, at which he was less adept. Sometimes Bert slept in the back room of the land office after returning late from night school. Briefly, Tad and May moved to Salem and the family was temporarily reunited.39
Bert acquired a second teacher-mentor, Miss Jennie Gray, daughter of a Salem banker, and his learning curve arced upward. Gray took him to the public library, signed him up for borrowing privileges, and channeled his imagination into new dimensions. He eagerly digested classics by Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Voltaire. He sped through David Copperfield and his favorite, Ivanhoe, and dived into Thackeray, Shakespeare, and American history. His appetite for books unveiled another side to his practical, mechanically oriented mind, and for the first time people came to see flashes of brilliance and to note his unusually supple intelligence, his curiosity to explore the universe of knowledge. Miss Gray, who also became Bert’s Sunday school teacher, invited him to socials and picnics, where he met young people, including at least one brief paramour, Daisy Trueblood. Bert participated in a Quaker debate club in which he successfully vanquished his opponent with his argument that war had destroyed more men than alcohol had.40
Hoover made time for fun in his crowded life, cultivating friendships, playing baseball, swimming, and configuring jigsaw puzzles. As always, the outdoors beckoned. He grew to love Oregon’s vast expanses of forests, mountains, and streams. He found a greater variety of fish than in Iowa, and he learned the art of fly-fishing. While using worms to fish with young companions, Bert was approached by a kindly stranger who gave each boy three flies. Suddenly, Bert caught more and bigger fish. From that point onward, he fished exclusively with flies and dismissed as amateurs anyone who used live bait. He fished the Willamette and its tributaries, as well as other rivers, streams, and, occasionally, millponds for panfish. His favorite adversary was the cutthroat trout, hungry as it battled upstream to spawn. As an adult, he returned frequently to Oregon, enjoying not only the fishing, but frying and eating his finny prey, the camaraderie of the campfire, and camping in the wilderness. Solaced beneath the sunset or the stars, his mind rested.41
The description Hoover paints in his Memoirs verges on poetry. “Oregon lives in my mind for its gleaming wheat fields, its abundant fruit, its luxuriant forest vegetation, and the fish in the mountain streams,” he writes. “To step into its forests with their tangles of berry bushes, their ferns, their masses of wild flowers, stirs up odors peculiar to Oregon. . . . Within these woods are never-ending journeys of discovery.” He remembered waters crowded with hungry trout, where fishermen were sparse and nature bounteous, where one could catch a day’s limit within hours, where descending a thousand-foot canyon to a stream and climbing back up loaded with fish was an afternoon’s diversion. Years later, the joy reverberated.42
In hindsight, the time spent at Newberg and Salem assumed a positive perspective. Uncle John was less a demon than a reasonably perceptive foster parent, the tension between the boy and the man basically a struggle between two strong-willed individualists, each well-meaning. When Bert left Oregon, he learned that Minthorn had not deducted a penny for board or expenses during the six years he lived there, and Bert’s remainder of his parents’ estate, wisely invested, had actually increased.43
Salem broadened Hoover’s vistas. Every day a host of individuals tromped through the waiting room of the land company, where Bert tuned in to their conversations and serendipitous facts stuck to his magnetic brain. Hoover soaked up information from farmers, ranchers, soldiers, explorers, lawyers, businessmen, speculators, and migrants. The boy heard familiar names such as Jefferson and Lincoln, and new ones such as Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison. At times the conversations drifted to the dawn of the Republic and the Civil War, and the men hashed out the relative merits of Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant, as well as the merits of free trade versus protectionism. Hoover’s curiosity was titillated by one argument between Quaker Republicans who embraced transferring the county seat and Democrats who opted for the status quo. Democrats were reactionaries who never wanted to change anything, Bert complained. Already as a teenager, he was a Progressive Republican.44
While political discussions whetted the young man’s appetite, they were less important to his immediate future than his meeting with a mining engineer named Robert Brown. Unlike conversation with most visitors, theirs was neither trivial nor accidental. Brown was an old friend of Bert’s father who had come to Salem to meet Jesse’s son. Their conversations extended over several days, focusing on the geological engineer’s profession. He explained to Bert that mining engineers spent most of their time roaming the outdoors, exploring the boundaries of their minds. Brown emphasized the importance of precision and management, which Hoover possessed. Skill at mathematics, Hoover’s forte, was essential. Mathematics was to an engineer what a scalpel was to a surgeon. The chat with Brown was a spark that struck kindling waiting to burst into flame. It infused the youth with a sense of purpose for the first time—of fitting his gifted mind to an undertaking molded for it. Further, geologists were rare in the West, where opportunities were greatest. A college degree, however, was essential. The encounter proved providential, yet Hoover never met Brown again.45
The teenager ruminated over his future. He talked to other engineers, visited local foundries, and inspected sawmills, repair shops, and mines before settling on the specialty of mining engineering. Then he began scrutinizing college catalogs. Substantial obstacles existed. He lacked sufficient money and had not earned a high school diploma. His relatives approved of his ambition to attend college and encouraged it, raising no objections to his becoming an engineer. However, the close-knit family insi
sted that Bert enroll at a Quaker university. Dr. Minthorn even obtained a scholarship for his foster son at Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Indiana. Yet Earlham did not offer a diploma in mining engineering and Hoover could find no Quaker college that did. A war of wills seemed to leave Bert at a dead end. It would not profit Hoover, his God-fearing relatives inveighed, to sharpen his mind and yet mortgage his soul.46
Bert read in a Portland daily newspaper a prominent story pertaining to the founding of a new public university to open October 1, 1891, for admission of its first, or pioneer, class. California’s millionaire U.S. senator Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate who had lost his only son, intended to devote much of his fortune to the creation of a university at his ranch near present-day Palo Alto that would become the West Coast equivalent of the Ivy Leagues. The faculty would be recruited nationally and already promised star quality. Dr. David Starr Jordan, a prominent scientist, left Indiana University to become Stanford’s first president. He raided the Indiana faculty for luminaries that included Dr. Joseph Swain to head the Mathematics Department and Dr. John Casper Branner to chair the Department of Geology and Mining. Bert read further that Swain would arrive in Portland that spring to administer entrance examinations. Hoover craved the opportunity, yet his family resisted stubbornly. Then Minthorn, who was well connected, asked if the Dr. Swain giving the exam was Joseph Swain, a devout Quaker, which indeed he was. That carried the argument. No institution that employed Swain could be either second-rate or worldly, the physician declared.47
Now all Bert had to do was pass the exam. He had a meager formal education, but a sharp mind and a ton of determination. Swain talked with the youth beforehand and watched him industriously plow through the lengthy test. Hoover did extraordinarily well on some sections, yet fell woefully short on others. He could not be admitted on the basis of the exam. His Achilles’ heel was English, which would continue to challenge him throughout his collegiate career. Hoover had sound, imaginative ideas and could express himself clearly, yet his spelling, punctuation, and grammar, largely self-taught, were lacking, and he could not conjugate irregular verbs. Nonetheless, Swain was impressed by Hoover’s tenacity and his intention to make something of himself. He was exactly the type of student Stanford wanted, given encouragement and embellishment, perhaps the proverbial diamond in the rough. Swain encouraged Bert to come to Stanford during the summer, receive tutoring in his weak areas, and retake the exam in time for the fall opening on October 1. As for money, he could work his way through. It was a gamble, but Swain recognized the young man’s character and spirit.48
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