First Fishing

Last week President Hoover & friends drove out to the Rapidan camp for two days. He pulled on hip boots at once, went fishing by himself, caught twelve trout. One was 14 in. long. After lunch he napped. In a cold drizzle during the late afternoon he reeled in eight more trout, bringing his day's catch to the legal limit. Sunday newspapers and White House mail were dropped into the camp from an Army airplane. Wet, bleak weather drove the President & party back to Washington early.

P: National Hospital Day (May 12) got a Presidential endorsement. All good citizens were advised to go to hospitals "and familiarize themselves with their splendid service."

P: All within 15 min. on the White House south lawn President Hoover had his picture taken with: 1) the U. S. and Canadian Davis Cup teams; 2) nine schoolteachers from Portsmouth, N. H.; 3) 55 members of the American-Czechoslovakian Society of Illinois; 4) delegates from the National Society of the Daughters of 1812.

P: Ambassador John North Willys dropped in to inform the President formally that he was resigning his post in Poland to go back to automobile making.

P: Henry Ford called at the White House. To the President: "We're selling all the cars we can make and we're getting in lots of cash, some of it in big bills. I mean by big bills the old-style large-size ones that might have been in hiding. If the people who quit business to go into gambling a few years ago would go back to work, they could sell all they produce." Mr. & Mrs. Ford drove off in a Lincoln (the White House impartially uses Cadillacs, Pierce-Arrows, Lincolns--three of each) to "enjoy the flowers" in Virginia.

P: Herbert Hoover once attended Pacific College at Newberg, Ore. Last week Dr. Levi Talbot Pennington, its president, was at the White House to interest President Hoover in a campaign to raise $300,000 for Pacific's endowment.

P: To Architect Dwight James Baum of New York President Hoover presented the Better Homes gold medal for designing the best small house in 1931. At Fieldston, N. Y., one Francis Collins lives in the prize Baum house.

P: Last week President Hoover could stop worrying about being renominated next month in Chicago. With Kentucky's 25 votes, he had 22 more than the necessary convention majority of 578 already pledged.

P: President Hoover went to Richmond, Va. to address a conference of Governors on taxation and economy. He exhibited a table showing the rise of all governmental costs--Federal, State, municipal-- from less than three billion dollars in 1913 to 14 billions in 1930. As the President left the rostrum, New York's ambitious Roosevelt stepped forward with outstretched hand. "Glad to see you again," said the President as they shook hands. Governor Roosevelt was ready with a compliment: "Very good speech, Mr. President." During the Wilson era the Hoovers and the Roosevelts were fast friends, saw much of each other at Sunday night suppers.

Next day the Governors and their ladies journeyed to Washington to be dined at the White House. Minnesota's gay Farmer-Laborite Olson, who had waved from the Richmond rostrum to an unidentified woman as the band played the national anthem, missed the dinner. Reporters found him at the Powhatan Hotel, caught in "the press of official business."

In the State dining room plump Mrs. Clayton Douglass Buck was on the President's right because her husky husband runs Delaware, first State to ratify the Constitution. On the President's left in golden spangles, gold shoes and jade earrings was sharp, smart, colorful Mrs. Gifford Pinchot who had just been defeated for Congress in Pennsylvania (see p. 15). On leaving the White House, Governor Roosevelt, always jovial with the Press, when asked what he had discussed with President Hoover, said: "One may not talk when leaving the White House. I've been there before." Governor Pinchot was asked if he talked politics. "Not a pol," said he. "Not a tic."

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