his little
matter of earning their way through college. And both of them did.

In most of the things that Herbert Hoover did as a college boy to earn
his needed money he revealed an unusual faculty for "organizing" and
"administering" which is precisely a faculty that as a man he has
revealed to the world in highest degree. He organized, at some profit to
himself, the system of collecting and distributing the laundry of the
college boys which had been done casually and unsatisfactorily by
various San Jose and San Francisco establishments. He acted also as
impresario, at a modest commission, for various lecturers and
musicians, developing an arrangement for bringing visiting stars from
San Francisco to the near-by university.

More important in its permanent influence on student activities was his
work in reorganizing the system of conducting general student body
affairs, especially the financial side of these affairs. In his Senior
year he had been made treasurer of the student body and on taking office
found little treasure and much confusion. Each of the many student
activities had its own separate being, its own officers and own
funds--or debts--and a dangerous freedom from general student control.
Hoover worked out a system by which all control was vested in the
officers of the general student body, and all funds passed into and out
of a general treasury. The Hoover system of student affairs management
prevails, in its essential features, in the university today.

In later years, as trustee of the university, he was the initiating
figure in reorganizing the handling of all the institution's many
million dollars worth of properties, and so his organizing genius is
evidenced today at Stanford both in the management of student
activities and in the handling of the financial affairs of the whole
university.

But the work that he did in his student days that paid him best, because
it brought him more than money, was that which he did partly for, and
partly at the recommendation of his "major" professor, Dr. John Casper
Branner, a great geologist and remarkable developer of geological
students.

Dr. Branner has been one of Stanford's greatest assets from the day of
its opening in all his successive capacities as professor,
vice-president, and president, and he still wields a benign influence on
the institution as resident professor and president emeritus. It was the
particular good fortune of young Hoover to find th