WEST BRANCH, IOWA: Hoover’s hometown is worth the short, easy trip

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By Bill Wundram | Tuesday, September 02, 2008 |

WEST BRANCH, Iowa — You never know what you’re going to find when you visit President Herbert Hoover’s hometown. There’ll be shirts and towels flapping on the clothesline alongside his birthplace cottage, and …

... an easy stroll away, you’ll see Caroline Kennedy’s playhouse in the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. A few steps from the dollhouse is the celebrated “Rooster Flour Sack.” If flour sacks can be precious, this one must be! It hasn’t been out of sealed-lock storage for 15 years.

The Hoover complex is a mere 48 miles from the Quad-Cities, a quick and easy turn off Interstate 80.

All of the 81-acre Hoover National Historic Site is over a vast green area, an Iowa treasure that draws 60,000-65,000 visitors a year. Too bad that more Quad-Citians don’t visit. Attendance from Cedar Rapids is generally greater than from Davenport, officials say. The Hoover complex is always something that Quad-Citians are going to visit but never get around to.

I spent a couple hours in the museum before strolling the shady acres owned by the National Park Service.

Understand now that the Hoover Presidential Museum and Library is not strictly an homage to the 31st president of the United States. As expected, you’ll find all you want to know, and some things you may not want to know, about him in this gigantic stone building that’s circled by a lawn, prairie grass and native flowers.

Going beyond Hoover, director Tim Walch has pulled off such past national displays as those on cowboy movies and the American circus. This summer, it’s “Children in the White House: Caroline Kennedy’s Dolls.”

Try the “children” display first and don’t expect anything of the Chatty Cathy or Cabbage Patch genre. It’s not just Caroline’s dolls, but also the dolls and lifestyles of past and present White House children.

It’s a vast, colorful and interactive display that humanizes the White House and its children. Forty-two presidents and their nearly 2,000 children have lived in the White House. They’ve grown up in front of millions of eyes and ears, and all of the children were saddled with high expectations.

The exhibition is a peek into the private moments of these presidential kids, their laughter and screams, and how they scribbled on the walls with crayons. I found out whose cats the presidents’ kids took up and down the White House elevator and who tied shoelaces together under a state dining room table. Spooky, too, was the ouija board smuggled into Lincoln’s bedroom to conjure up ghosts. There’s even a life-size mannequin of Archie, Teddy Roosevelt’s son, sliding down a real banister.

Two of the most-watched presidential tots were John and Caroline Kennedy. While John Jr. got rocket ships and toy soldiers, his sister was given dolls as gifts. Caroline received hundreds of dolls, and 70 of the most interesting are on loan to the Hoover museum.

“Caroline” is one nook in the exhibit, with a mural replica of her bedroom, videos of how she had her own private kindergarten (with some classmates) in the White House and the actual playhouse given her by Charles de Gaulle, the president of France. Its window box has pink flowers and the door is bright red.

Everything here is on loan from the John F. Kennedy Library. It is one of the most sought-after exhibitions from museums around the nation.

“It was quite an undertaking from a conservation perspective,” said Frank Rigg of the Kennedy Library. “Many of the dolls are handcrafted and therefore beautiful and delicate. Restoration efforts have returned each doll to its original appearance.”

Caroline received the dolls from world leaders, including Indira Gandhi of India and Monaco’s Princess Grace. The display tells it all, including Caroline’s favorite stories, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

This “doll thing” goes far before and after the Kennedys, though. There are murals of Amy Carter inline skating on the White House drive as well as stories of Chelsea Clinton and how she was named after Joni Mitchell’s 1960s pop song “Chelsea Morning.” All of the presidential kids, of all ages, are involved, right up to the present.

The rooster sack in a ‘warehouse’

Branch off from the dolls to stroll inside the museum to a big rustic warehouse with beams and barn wood walls and see a collection of flour sacks. They are not just blah old sacks, but embroidered ones. The Hoover museum owns 400 of them, given to the president in gratitude for his work feeding the people of Belgium and northern France during and after World War I. To thank Hoover, the people of Belgium embroidered the sacks that had contained the food that saved them.

How they have been so gently preserved for 95 years is one of the great achievements of the Hoover museum. The most famous is the “Rooster Flour Sack.” It is an artistic wonder, the work of an unknown seamstress. It is on display for the first time in more than 15 years and will remain in the museum galleries until Dec. 24. The sack is fragile and can be exhibited for only short periods of time under very low light.

I never thought of a flour sack as exciting, but the rooster sack belongs in an art gallery.

Other embroidered sacks show the gratitude of the Belgians in a setting that looks like a dim warehouse. Hoover became, in the words of Gen. John Pershing, “The food regulator of the world.” Those fancy sacks tell a lot about the gratitude of hungry people.

Back outside …

The Hoover site can be an 81-acre walking tour with its grounds and antique buildings owned by the National Park Service.

The richly shaded area, open free daily, is a visit to Hoover’s early days. A 12-minute film is shown in the Visitor Center. Visitors are welcome at the tiny Hoover Birthplace Cottage. There is a blacksmith regularly working at the forge in the Hoover blacksmith shop, northwest of the cottage. The Friends Meetinghouse is unchanged from the days when the Society of Friends, or Quakers, held services of silent meditation. President Hoover and his wife are buried on a hillside overlooking the cottage.

Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.

Caroline’s dolls and West Branch

Visitors associate West Branch, Iowa, a town of 2,188 people, with Herbert Hoover, the U.S. president who was born there in a tiny cottage.

The enterprising Hoover Presidential Library and Museum also offers other national-quality exhibits, the current one being “Children in the White House: Caroline Kennedy’s Dolls.” That exhibit will be on display until Nov. 2.

The “Rooster Flour Sack” exhibition will remain in the museum galleries until Dec. 24. A free postcard will be given to visitors at the “rooster” exhibit. Museum admission is $6; senior citizens, $3; children younger than 15, free. There is no admission charged to enter the National Park Service grounds, which includes the Hoover Birthplace Cottage and other buildings from his younger days. Hours at both places are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day of the week.

Beyond the Hoover complex, I found an eating place with home-cooked food, Reid’s Beans, 107 E. Main St. It is small and cozy, and the salads and cookies are especially good.

Contact information: The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, 210 Parkside Drive, P.O. Box 488, West Branch, IA, 52358-0488; telephone, (319) 643-5301; Web site, hoover.nara.gov.

The Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, P.O. Box 607, West Branch, IA, 52358; telephone, (319) 643-2541; Web site, nps.gov/heho.

Attractions: The Hoover complex is the major attraction, but there are other scheduled events throughout the year. “Laura Ingalls Wilder Remembered” will be a free program at the Hoover museum on Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 1.

The program, beginning at 1:30 p.m., will include selections by the Marengo Civil War Band. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., interpreters will demonstrate historic crafts. Guided walks of the tallgrass prairie are at 10 a.m., 1:30 and 3 p.m. On this day, the blacksmith shop will be in operation. Admission is free to the special activities in the museum and for the prairie walk; regular admission will be charged to go through the galleries on Labor Day.

Getting there: The Hoover complex is just off Interstate 80; make a right turn at Exit 254.

Up next: Wundram’s Wanderings, Bill’s Staycations series, is taking a brief vacation in deference to his trip to Alaska last week. The series will resume Sept. 21 with a column on Bill’s trip to Burlington, Iowa. That will be followed Sept. 28 by Fulton, Ill., and it will conclude Oct. 5 with his visit to Dixon, Ill.