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Friday, May 24, 2013
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LBJ visits West Branch, and calls a meeting ...
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · August 17, 2012
Just after leaving office, President Lyndon B. Johnson called together his entire staff for the first and only time after a February 1969 trip to … West Branch.
John Fawcett of West Branch, drafted in 1968 and eventually assigned to LBJ’s White House when the 36th president started thinking about his own library-museum, said Johnson’s tour of the Herbert Hoover Library-Museum had made an impression.
“All I knew about Hoover was that he caused the Great Depression,” Fawcett quoted Johnson, who had listed off everything he remembered from the tour with wife Lady Bird. “I realized that Hoover was a great man and that’s what I want you to do in my library!”
Fawcett, who started as a laborer at the Hoover Library, had worked his way up to a position with the National Archives and Records Administration just before the draft. His interest and experience in presidential history and an influential friend got him off the rifle range and into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“The whole tour of the exhibits was maybe 15 minutes long,” Fawcett told a crowd Saturday afternoon in the auditorium of the Library-Museum, gathered to mark the 50th anniversary of the facility. “I was amazed how much he absorbed.”
Audrey Kofoed, who said she was born during the Hoover administration, told more than 110 in attendance that she remembers “the crowd spilled out over into the streets” at the 1962 dedication of the Library-Museum.
Mike Owen had been publisher and editor of the West Branch Times when the newspaper helped local historians write a book on the city’s 150th anniversary.
“You needed binoculars to see what was going on,” he said of Hoover’s burial service in 1964.
Kofoed said that animosity between the community and the National Park Service started when the park began purchasing property around the Hoover birthplace cottage with the goal of taking the setting back to the 1870s.
“People weren’t sure how much it was going to take,” she said. “And some were not anxious to sell.”
Dwight Miller, who had served on the library staff, said there was even a rumor that a Tastee Freez would go up across from the cottage.
“There were indications that commercial interests would move in,” he said.
Francis Abel, who started in 1954 what would become a 38-year agriculture teaching job at West Branch High School, said the city and school administration feared the loss of property taxes.
“It didn’t amount to anything,” he said of the claim.
Kofoed and Abel agreed that it is important for the cooperation between the library and the community to continue.
Pat Wildenberg, once the audio-visual archivist for the library, said the library-community relationship is “symbiotic.”
“It is important that this institution doesn’t get isolated,” he said, “or it will shrivel.”
Kofoed said descendants of Hoover have always been “gracious” to the community and library.
“It’s wonderful for them to come and give moral support,” she said. “It is wonderful they are still involved.”
Three of Hoover’s family sat in the audience that afternoon: grandson Andrew and wife Jeannie Hoover, and great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover, who today is a conservative commentator who frequently appears on Fox News.
“They are close to my heart,” Andrew Hoover said of the library staff.
The Hoovers recently lost their home to the Colorado wildfires, as well as numerous Hoover documents particularly important to the family.
“These things are lost, and it is more sad than you can imagine,” he said.
Not all things were lost, though, Margaret Hoover added. Some papers survived the fire, as well as a horseshoe from Hoover’s father’s blacksmith shop.
Margaret Hoover noted that the Hoover Library-Museum is the only one of the 13 presidential libraries with a 100-percent satisfaction rating by its visitors.
“We feel lucky West Branch is so accepting, and that we have this partnership,” she said. |
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