Laban J. Miles

MILES, HOOVER, HOPPER

Posted By: Sharon Elijah (email)
Date: 6/9/2018 at 09:29:12

West Branch Times, West Branch, Iowa April 16, 1931

Laban J. Miles, 87, Uncle of President Hoover is Dead

An Associated Press dispatch of interest to many resident and former residents of West Branch, announces the death of Major Laban J. Miles, 87, uncle of President Herbert Hoover, at his home at Pawhuska, Okla. Sunday afternoon. The item adds that Mr. Miles was one of Oklahoma’s most colorful figures and had served as agent for the Osage Indian reservation by appointment of President Hayes.

Mrs. Miles was a sister to President Hoover’s mother, and when the Hoover children were orphaned they went to the home of this uncle and aunt in Oklahoma for a time.

The Indian Industrial School which was established here at one time, was sponsored by the Friends under the leadership of Laban Miles’ father, Benjamin Miles, and the Osage Indians were from the reservation where L. J. Miles was agent, in Oklahoma and Indian Territories. The Indians of this school are vividly remembered by many. Just a year or two ago one of them, Jasper Rogers, came to West Branch and hunted up acquaintances of his boyhood here.

Last summer representatives of the engineering schools came to West Branch to select a stone from the Hoover birthplace to send to the Laban J. Miles farm in Oklahoma. There a marker was being built as a memorial to Herbert Hoover, who studied geology on his uncle’s farm, and who with other students worked there during one vacation while he was a student at Stanford University. He discovered a new limestone at that time, and the marker was intended as a historic tribute to him. Stones from Hoover’s birthplace and from his Palo Alto, Calif., home were used in connection with the native limestone for the Oklahoma shaft.

A recently published interview with Mrs. Blanche M. Hopper, superintendent of nurses in the Ottumwa, Iowa, hospital, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Laban J. Miles, gives a vivid picture of the president as she remembered him during the time he lived with her parents. She recalls him as a boy who was crazy about horses, dogs, stones and with a large appetite.

Mrs. Hopper is quoted as saying: “He always was hungry and had a particular fondness for corn bread. During the war when he was trying to get everyone to use corn bread instead of wheat, my mother jokingly wrote him that she thought he was acting for his own personal inclination.

“Herbert played cowboy and Indian with the other boys and spent most of his time on horseback. But he had one interest that other boys didn’t have.

“That was stones. He always was bringing them home. In the year he lived with us he gathered together a great collection of rocks and when he left for California, he was heartbroken because he couldn’t take it with him.”

As a young man Hoover visited the Miles many times at Lawrence, Kan., where they moved.

Mrs. Hopper recounts a Hoover anecdote that Patrick J. Hurley, now secretary of war, brought back with him from France. Hurley is an Oklahoman. He visited the Miles after the war.

Hurley came out of the front line trenches and was bivouacked in a Belgian village. He tried to talk to the children, but they didn’t understand him.

Finally he said: “”Don’t any of you know about America?”

“America” struck a responsive chord.

“Herbert Hoover,” shouted a youngster and the others took it up like a chant.

“American meant Herbert Hoover to those war sufferers,” Hurley told the Miles.

“We relatives are proud of Herbert,” Mrs. Hopper admits, “proud of him, not because he has become president, but because he is the fine, strong, fearless man that he is.”