Let’s have a word association test. I say Herbert Hoover. And you say?

The silence is deafening, people. More clues?

The Great Depression.

Yes, that Herbert Hoover.

Bert Hoover — his friends all called him Bert — and I crossed paths on my recent trip to Iowa to see my son Dennis.

We were driving from Moline to Iowa City when a sign on Interstate 80 — yes, our very own I-80; you thought it only ran from Vallejo to San Francisco? — caught my eye. It touted the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum.

Pull over, I said. Immediately.

Joke here. I said nothing of the kind. I asked instead if the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum was some kind of Iowa joke. One of those curiosities that dot America’s rural landscape, like Paul Bunyan Land and Singing Rocks.

Dennis didn’t know for sure. Although the Hoover attraction was located only a dozen miles from his house, he’d never paid it any mind.

What do we know about Mr. Hoover? He occupied the White House when the stock market crashed in 1929 and the country slid into the Great Depression. He lost in a landslide to FDR in 1932. His reputation has never recovered.

In short, a Herbert Hoover museum sounded duller than dirt. Certainly eastern Iowa had far better attractions.

I was wrong. While newly planted corn fields do have their charm, they do not a vacation make. Two days later, Dennis and I were headed back on 80 to the tiny hamlet of West Branch.

The son of a blacksmith, Hoover was born in West Branch, population 300, in 1874. The town doesn’t look much bigger today. Most of the acreage is part of a national historic site devoted to the first president born west of the Mississippi.

I asked the ticket taker a test question. Is this the home of our greatest president? “Oh yes,” she said. Her smile revealed otherwise.

We fell in with a group of Iowa fifth graders who had bounced for two hours on a school bus to pay homage to the nation’s only Hawkeye president.

I expected to hear a white-washed account of Hoover and the Depression, but the guide, Matthew Schaefer, a Hoover archivist, didn’t mince words.

When the nation’s economy collapsed, Hoover wasn’t up to the task of expanding federal programs and spending to deal it, he said. “That’s why in 1932 he got whacked in the election.”

I suspect he was tempted, but Schaefer resisted making economic and political comparisons between Hoover’s era and our own.

You learn a lot about a man when you spend two hours in his museum. Born into a Quaker family, Hoover got shipped off at age 11 to relatives in Oregon when his parents died.

After attending Stanford University, he became a millionaire as a mining engineer. Then he devoted himself to humanitarian causes.

Hoover was a smart technocrat who served eight years in the cabinets of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. In his finest hour, he got tapped to run for president in 1928. He made exactly seven campaign speeches. He defeated Al Smith in a landslide.

Having risen from humble beginnings, Hoover believed in individual initiative. “If I can do it, you can do it,” Schaefer summed up.

The Great Depression and Roosevelt’s landslide victory crushed Hoover. He left the White House suffused with bitterness. “You can be a great man and a flawed man,” Schaefer told the students.

Few today are interested in this dour icon of a pre-modern time, “the last of the old-fashioned presidents,” as a museum display put it. The Hoover Museum is on busy I-80, but only 25,000 people a year, not counting captive school kids, visit.

Hoover outlived John Kennedy. When he died in 1964, he could have been buried in Palo Alto, where he lived most of his life, or Arlington National Cemetery. Instead, he went home to West Branch.

Having absorbed the details of Hoover’s life inside the museum, we set out across a green meadow for the grave. We found Hoover lying next to his wife on a knoll, under matching slabs of white Vermont marble and a threatening Iowa sky.

The simplicity of this final resting place is stunning enough. But when it hit me why Hoover picked this spot over all others, emotions welled up.

East of the grave, across the field where he played as a child and the stream where he learned to swim and fish, sits the smallest of houses in clear view.

Herbert Hoover, the blacksmith’s son, knew both towering triumph and bitter defeat during his decades on the world stage.

At the end, he chose to be buried within view of the two-room cottage where he came into this world.

Kevin can be reached at 256-2217 or Napa Valley Register,  P.O. Box 150, Napa 94559 or kcourtney@napanews.com