Hoover-Curtis

P: Vice President-Elect Curtis leased, last week, the ten-room Vice-Presidential suite in Washington's Mayflower Hotel. Mr. Curtis's sister, Mrs. Edward E. Gann, and her husband, for 20 years a Washington lawyer, will make their home with Mr. Curtis. Since Mr. Curtis is a widower, Mrs. Gann will receive at Vice-Presidential social functions.

P: Having interviewed multitudes of Congressmen, well-wishers, job-hunters, advisers, Herbert Clark Hoover left his temporary headquarters at the Mayflower Hotel, entrained for Florida. With him went Mrs. Hoover and an entourage of friends, newsmen, photographers, hawkshaws. Mr. Hoover had canceled his proposed West Indian trip, was to spend a pre-inaugural month on semi-vacation at the home of James Cash Penney, famed chain store dry-goods tycoon.

On Nov. 8 Mr. Penney had traveled from Oregon to Palo Alto, Calif., and had personally offered the Penney home to Mr. Hoover as a vacation spot. This generosity was undoubtedly stimulated by the admiration of like for like. Mr. Penney, like Mr. Hoover, followed a stressful, impoverished career to a felicitous climax. James Penney is now 54. His father was a Missouri Baptist parson. James was the seventh of 12 children. At the age of eight he earned his own clothing with a piggery, a watermelon patch. He ran a small store where the currency was pins. Stores of various kinds have occupied him ever since; he has been store clerk or storekeeper in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah. On $50 a month, he married Berta A. Hess of Denver. She died in 1910, left two sons.* By this time the Penney dry goods chain had been started. It now includes more than 1,000 links. Several years ago Mr. Penney felt his education was sparse. He closed his office every afternoon for 18 months, studied with a tutor. He attributes his business success, however, to the book Everybody Ahead, or Getting the Most out of Life by the famed success-philosopher Orison Swett Marden.

The Penney home is on Belle Isle, across a causeway from Miami Beach. At Miami, the Hoover party was welcomed by Governor Carlton amid a Florida fanfaronade. Host Penney was not at Belle Isle to greet Guest Hoover; he left, last week, on a round-the-world trip. But he had given Mr. Hoover the keys.

The Penney home is a spacious Italian Renaissance villa of white limestone with a low roof of apricot-colored tiles. It overlooks Biscayne Bay, is set in the midst of tropical greenery cut by serpentine driveways. On the estate is a shallow goldfish pool bright with water blossoms, a mosaic tiled swimming pool, a putting green and an observatory with a little cupola like those of Mohammedan minarets.

P: Mr. Hoover conferred with Washington's "Dry" Senator Jones, New Jersey's "Wet" Senator Edge. He induced them to withdraw their joint resolution, pending in Congress, calling for an investigation of prohibition enforcement. In place of Congressional action, Mr. Hoover intends to appoint, shortly after he enters office, a sage, non-partisan committee of perhaps nine or eleven persons to conduct a thorough enforcement inquiry report to Mr. Hoover.

P: Speaker Nicholas Longworth talked with Mr. Hoover about the special session of Congress to be called in April. Mr. Longworth had a scheme to limit the session to Farm Relief and Tariff Revision, a limitation desired by Mr. Hoover, who does not wish other issues to impede the farm and tariff momentum. By the Longworth scheme the new House would appoint, for the time being, only those four committees (out of 46) necessary for farm and tariff action (Ways and Means, Rules, Agriculture, Accounts). With this check on the House, any Senate discussion of questions other than Tariff Revision and Farm Relief would be merely in the nature of debate. Mr. Hoover was enthusiastic. Congressmen interested in water power were less so, provided potential dissent.

P: Thomas Alva Edison celebrated, last week, the first anniversary of his remark: "If the people of the United States fail to elect Herbert Hoover as the next president, they can be classed as a bunch of saps."

*His second wife died in 1923, left one son. By the present Mrs. Caroline Autenreitle Penney, he has a daughter.