President Herbert Hoover is probably one of the most controversial presidents in the history of the United States. As the last Republican President before the four continuous administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hoover was blamed greatly for ineffective leadership at the beginning of the great depression. Here are seven things though that you don’t know about President Herbert Hoover.

1. Herbert Hoover was the first head of any host nation to not attend the Olympics being hosted in their home country. Hoover was President of the United States from 1929-1933 and didn’t attend the Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles in 1932.

2. Herbert Hoover was the first United States President born west of the Mississippi River.

3. Hoover was orphaned after his mother died when he was five and his father died when he was nine.

4. Herbert Hoover attended Stanford University (then known as Leland Stanford Junior University) in the first year of the school’s existence.

5. Less than a decade before being elected President of the United States as a Republican in 1928, Hoover was pursued by Democratic leaders to be their nominee.

6. When former President Hoover toured what would become West Germany following World War II to ascertain what the country’s food needs were, his mode of transportation was rail and his personal car was the former personal car of German Field Marshal Herman Goring.

7. More than twenty years after losing his bid for reelection to Franklin Roosevelt, President Hoover was offered the opportunity to become a Senator from New York to fill an unexpired term, but he turned the opportunity down.

No former President lived longer after leaving office than President Hoover. Through those many years a great deal was done to rehabilitate his image and in later life he was perceived much better than he was when the country was in the thick of the Great Depression. President Hoover led the country through one of its most difficult times, and paid the political price for it too.