FOOD-MUSIC.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 48, Issue 80, 14 January 1928, Page 2

FOOD-MUSIC.

HOOVER AND PADEREWSKI. The following story about Mr Herbert Hoover, who is mentioned as a likely candidate for the United States Presidency next year, is told in Scribner s Magazine. In the early 'nineties when Hoover was managing a laundry to pay his way through Leland Stanford University', he and another undergraduate thought of a wav to turn a pretty penny. Paderewski was on one ot Ins 'early trans-Continental tours. Why not arrange a concert in San Jose ? Ihe tee for the musician would be 2000 dollars:, it required no special mathematical divination to figure out at least 4000 dollars' worth of audience. This was the first large scale-business venture of the future Secretary of Commerce, and from it he learned a good deal about business. He learned that Holy Week is a bad time for amusement enterprises in a devout community and he learned that the pianist was not so well known on the Coast as he was to become in later years. The box-office receipts totalled, as a fact, only 1600 dollars, and the youthful enterpreneurs could not scrane together enough to meet the deficit. "There was nothing for it but to make a clean breast to the musician's secretary- It was an awkward situation." Paderewski resolved it, once it came to his ears, with magnanimity. He stipulated that the undergraduates should deduct from the gross receipts 20 ner cent, for themselves: that out of this they would pay their expenses and divide'what was left: and that he would take the balance as his fee in full.