Last week, in her apartment in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, Mrs. Herbert Hoover, 68, died of a heart attack.†
Like her husband, Lou Henry Hoover was Iowa-born; like him, she moved West at an early age. As a girl in Whittier, Calif., where her father was the town's first banker, she was tall, lanky, not over-strong. On long camping trips in the mountains with her father, she learned to love nature; later, at Leland Stanford University, she majored in natural history.
A serious and intent student, she was discussing rock specimens in the laboratory with her professor one day when a serious, intent...