Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Herbert Hoover was the subject of boxy adjectives such as straight and narrow his whole life, and not just because his head and shoulders featured an abundance of right angles. He was a reformer like A. P. Giannini at Bank of Italy, but on a campus scale, forcing all the sports teams to keep standard books and pay their bills, to behave like twentieth-century bureaucrats and reap the resulting efficiencies. It’s what the region and the world needed, and despite his lack of familial, academic, or athletic distinction, Stanford’s leading men recognized their star pioneer when they saw him.