Herbert Hoover and Iowa

We love visiting Presidential museums, they are the perfect combination of history and biography - my two favorite things to learn about, besides computers that is! So, when we were told that Herbert Hoover's museum is in Iowa not too far from our route ... we had to go. This is our 8th presidential museum. You can see all our blogposts about them by clicking on 'Posts About ... Presidential Libraries' in the right sidebar.

btw - I'm sure glad I'm writing this rather than speaking ... I find it almost impossible to speak 'herbert hoover' without getting tongue tied or dyslexic and coming out with herver hoobert or something :-) Just try it ... say Herbert Hoover 3 times fast!

Herbert Hoover's birthplace, museum and library are located in West Branch, Iowa.

What a pretty little town.

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

The little white house in this next photo is Herbert Hoover's actual birthplace. It's been restored, but it is the actual building in it's original location since 1874 when he was born.

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

Hoover was a Quaker and we had a great tour guide who made us experience the Friends Meeting house the way the Quakers would have ... in silent meditation. She told us that Quakers believed that we all have a light within and the purpose of Sunday services was not to listen to a preacher talking about God, but to sit in silent meditation and find our God within. So we sat on the benches .. Jim on the men's side and Helen (the park ranger/tour guide) and I on the women's .. for a moment of silent meditation and then she continued the tour. That was great - thanks Helen! I didn't know I was a Quaker!?

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

I was fascinated with Hoover's biography.

• His childhood started out idyllic in West Branch with 2 siblings and happy parents. Then his father died when he was 6 and his mother when he was 9.
• He was sent to an uncle in Oregon, ended up graduating from Stanford with an engineering degree and went to Australia to manage mines.
• He came back to the states to marry Lou Henry - a fellow Stanford student. They moved to China with his engineering career, then to many places all around the world, becoming quite rich in the process.
• After WWI, Hoover organized the relief efforts American Relief Administration which fed 350 million people in 21 countries in the aftermath of the war. He became known as the Great Humanitarian
• He was elected to the Presidency in a landslide by an adoring electorate
• His first year of office was 1929 - the Great Depression hit and he took the blame. He was defeated for re-election by about as great a landslide as that which elected him!
• After a kind of exile during Roosevelt's administration, he worked closely with Truman to help Europe recover after WWII.

What a full life! And full of such huge ups and downs.

The museum also had an exhibit about Iowa A-Z which I thoroughly enjoyed. Who woulda thunk there'd be so much interesting stuff in Iowa! I could have spent a lot more time in that museum (I always say that) but Jim reminded me that the Lincoln museum in Springfield is next on our agenda and we'd better get going.

whew!

meanwhile, I need to take a 'work' day. I need to get our newsletter out in time to remind folks that our $29 special on new and renewing memberships is over on the last day of June. I also have lots of new 'show-me-how' computer videos I want to make, but that can wait till we get to Indian Lakes Thousand Trails where we'll stay for 2 weeks of catch-up before heading to Bowling Green, Ohio for the next FMCA convention where we'll be presenting 7 different seminars plus our hands-on Boot Camp during the evenings. See why we need to rest up? For our complete schedule see our website.

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Mississippi River and Iowa County Parks

When we visited Field of Dreams, we stayed at a nearby county park called 'New Wine.' Great name ... very nice park. We had it almost to ourselves.

I especially like it when there's a trail in the woods.

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

Next stop was the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, and we found another county park, called Mud Lake, right on the river.

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

A note about the photos in this blog: I first upload photos to my Picasa Web Album, then I select the ones I want and embed them in this blog. If you click on the link below the photo, it will take you to the album for this month. There are quite a few more photos in the album than what I add to the blog. If you click on a picture, instead of the link below it, you will see the larger sized photo from the Web Album - you will need to click 'Back' to come back here. We went to Dubuque to see the Mississippi River museum. We heard that it is quite worthwhile and they were right.

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

This exhibit demonstrated how the river floods. You could see the water level for the 1927 flood and how it would be over the bridge.

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

Jim tried his hand at the controls of a barge pilot simulator. One tug pushes 22,500 TONS on up to 15 barges. They don't move very fast or respond very quickly to the controls.

From Geeks on Tour 200906 (June)

I enjoyed learning about the issues of cargo transportation. The grain from Iowa farmland gets loaded on these barges and they go downriver to New Orleans where they're loaded onto ocean going freighters bound for other continents. What takes 4 barges = 15 train cars or 60 trucks. River transportation is obviously the least expensive, but the river and surrounding environment suffers. So much to learn. I always feel overwhelmed when I visit museums like this.

Next comes Herbert Hoover museum in West Branch.

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