HOOVER, 31st, 1929-33

Tall, sturdy and energetic, with broad shoulders, hazel eyes, a round face, and straight grayish-brown hair, Herbert Clark Hoover would refuse to allow photographs while smoking cigars.

He was the first President born west of the Mississippi River. His parents were poor and he was orphaned at nine, but he amassed a fortune as a mine engineer and owner. He was to accumulate a personal estate estimated to be worth four million dollars by 1914.

He once described himself as a square doodler.

The word Hooverize was coined to mean saving, substituting, practicing self-denial, and thus helping win the war. Newspapers wrapped around the body for warmth were "Hoover Blankets." Cars that had broken down and were pulled by mule teams were "Hoover wagons." The ubiquitous empty pocket turned inside out was a "Hoover flag," and unappetizing jackrabbits were called "Hoover hogs." In his attacks on waste he instituted an impressive sequence of meetings and conferences (his own estimate was more than three thousand). In 1960, he wrote 55,952 letters with his staff.

Hoover's wife, Lou Henry, was the first First Lady to speak on the radio and give regular interviews. In the White House, the Hoovers often spoke to each other in Mandarin when they wanted to foil potential eavesdroppers. Through his mother, Hoover was an eighth cousin once removed of Richard Nixon.

He said, "My period of popularity lasted nearly fourteen years, which seems about the average. When the ultimate bump came, I was well fortified to accept it philosophically and, in fact, to welcome it, for democracy is a harsh employer."

Annual receptions amounted to a rapidly moving assembly line of thousands of handshakes. He said, "And often enough my hand would be so swollen for days after that I could not write with it. On one occasion a husky westerner with a turned-in diamond ring gave me such a warm grasp as to cut my hand badly, and we had to terminate the ceremony in a trickle of blood."

Death came in his suite on the 31st floor of the Waldorf Towers. The first word of Hoover's passing came in a terse, handwritten note on Waldorf stationery from his personal physician, Dr. Michael J. Lepore. It gave only name, date and time. Its text: "President Hoover. Oct. 20, 1964. Time: 11:35 A.M."

Active to the end of his days — he employed six secretaries to handle his correspondence — Hoover died at the age of ninety. Only one other President, John Adams, had lived as long. His body rests in a grave, the site of which he chose himself, on a grassy knoll overlooking the two-room cottage in which he was born on Aug. 10, 1874.

d. October 20, 1964 (Washington, DC) at 90 of a severe gastrointestinal hemorrhage.