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 techni
cally, 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!