The Pittsburgh Press (February 26, 1944)
Mrs. Hoover estate willed to ‘boys and their daddy’
‘Lucky to have had such a father and I’m lucky’ because of ‘three such men,’ letter says
San Jose, California (UP) –
The estate of Mrs. Herbert Hoover will be divided between her “two boys and their daddy,” a letter written by the wife of the former President disclosed today.
Mrs. Hoover wrote the informal letter to her sons, Herbert Jr. and Alan, two months before she died of a heart attack in New York Jan. 7, to replace a mislaid will. A hearing on admission of the letter to probate will be heard in Superior Court here March 8.
Mrs. Hoover told her two sons:
You have been lucky boys to have had such a father, and I a lucky woman to have had my life’s trail alongside the paths of three such men and boys.
Naming her sons executors, Mrs. Hoover disposed of an estate valued in excess of $10,000 in what she called “a series of friendly requests.”
She said:
To your daddy, I bequeath all my interest and rights in the community property acquired by us during our married life.
The former President will also receive her invested funds while the Hoover home at Stanford University and all real estate, except unspecified property in Washington, will go to her sons.
Furnishings and pictures in the Hoover home should be divided among members of the family, “of course including daddy first,” Mrs. Hoover wrote. Any cash remaining in her bank account after her personal affairs were settled, she suggested, should go to her grandchildren as “pocket money.”
Mrs. Hoover told her sons:
You both have been good boys and an immeasurable source of happiness and satisfaction to me. I know I can trust your disinterestedness and judgment in seeing this tiresome task through.