April 10th Through Time: Hooverball, Presidential Workouts & Birthday Surprises

A six-pound medicine ball, an eight-foot net, and the President of the United States. This wasn't some strange diplomatic incident. This was exercise. This was April tenth, and we're talking about Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first president, and the game he invented to stay in shape: Hooverball. It was apparently more strenuous than tennis, and more fun than just about anything else happening in his White House. And looking back, it's one of the few things from his presidency that feels… uncomplicated. Because the rest of Hoover’s story is a spectacular lesson in how a person’s entire legacy can be rewritten, almost overnight, by events far bigger than any one man.

Even a man who once fed millions and promised a chicken in every pot. Of course, Hoover wasn't the only one making a mark on this day. April tenth also gave us John Madden, born in 1936. The man who wasn't just a legendary football coach, but became the voice of the sport itself. His commentary—the booms, the whaps, the sheer, unadulterated joy of the game—made football understandable, and lovable, to generations. His name is still on one of the best-selling video games of all time. Now THAT is a legacy. We also have birthdays for actor and martial artist Steven Seagal, and the singer and actress Mandy Moore, whose career has had this wonderful, multi-act structure that keeps surprising us.

The actress and singer Sofia Carson shares the day as well. But let's go further back. Way back. To April tenth, 1460. This is a story that feels like it belongs in an opera. A Dominican friar named Anthony Neyrot is captured by pirates off the coast of Sicily. He's taken to Tunis, and under duress, he renounces his faith. He apostatizes. But then… regret eats at him. He has a vision of his old teacher, and he knows what he has to do. He goes back. He publicly reaffirms his Christianity, knowing full well what the penalty is. He was stoned to death on Holy Thursday, April tenth. It's a story of failure, redemption, and ultimate sacrifice, all packed into one dramatic, devastating arc.

And speaking of faith, on this day we also remember Saint Cyril of Jerusalem. A bishop from the fourth century whose writings are still read today. Think about that. Someone writing letters and lectures, explaining his faith in the year 350… and we are still reading his words, still debating them, still learning from them almost two millennia later. It’s a stunning example of the power of the written word to outlast empires. And finally, a small, beautiful detail. In the Christian calendar, this day can fall within the Easter season. When it does, it's a day for white vestments. A color symbolizing purity, joy, celebration.

The liturgy itself says, "We are, after all, celebrating." And I think that's a perfect frame for all of this. Because looking back at history isn't about mourning what's gone. It’s about celebrating the stories, the people, the sheer, improbable fact that any of it happened at all. So let's go back to that man with the medicine ball. Herbert Hoover. Before he was president, he was something of a global phenomenon. He was an orphan from Iowa, part of the very first class at Stanford University—a school he only got into after failing the entrance exam, which is a wonderful detail. By age twenty-seven, he was a partner in a London mining firm, a self-made millionaire who once said, "If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much." He was the embodiment of American ambition and competence.

And then came the First World War. Hoover pivoted. He became a humanitarian. He organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium, feeding millions of civilians trapped by the war. After the war, he ran the American Relief Administration, which sent food to a starving Europe, including, and this is crucial, the Soviet Union. His motto was magnificent: "Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times. People called him "The Great Humanitarian." He was, without question, one of the most admired men in the world. So when he ran for president in 1928, it felt like a foregone conclusion.

Here was the master organizer, the brilliant engineer, the great humanitarian. Who better to lead a nation in an age of prosperity? His campaign slogan was pure, uncut optimism: "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." And he won. In a landslide. And then, less than a year into his presidency, the stock market crashed. October 1929. The beginning of the Great Depression. And this is where the retrospective lens becomes so powerful. From our vantage point, we can see the collision coming. We can see a man whose entire life experience was built on individualism, on engineering problems, on the idea that private enterprise and voluntary cooperation could solve anything.

And he was about to collide with a systemic economic collapse that simply did not respond to those tools. He wasn't idle. He cut taxes. He increased public works spending. He pleaded with business leaders not to cut wages. But he fundamentally believed that direct federal relief—just giving money to the unemployed—would destroy the American spirit of self-reliance. He was terrified of creating a dependent class. So while he had been willing to feed a starving Europe, he resisted feeding a starving America with the full force of the federal government. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. And the public turned on him with a vengeance.

The Great Humanitarian, the most admired man in the world, became a symbol of cold indifference. The shantytowns full of homeless families that sprang up across the country? They were called "Hoovervilles." Newspapers used for blankets were "Hoover blankets." A pocket turned inside out to show you had no money was a "Hoover flag." His name became a curse. In 1932, he was swept out of office by Franklin Roosevelt, who promised a New Deal and a completely different philosophy of government. The contrast couldn't have been more stark. Hoover’s legacy was sealed. He became the man who fiddled while America burned.

But here's the turn. Here's what hindsight gives us. We can see that Hoover wasn't a monster. He was a man trapped by his own ideology, his own success. The very principles that made him a millionaire engineer and a world-famous humanitarian were precisely the wrong principles for the crisis he faced as president. It’s a tragedy, in the classic sense of the word. A great man brought low by his own defining characteristics. And that’s why Hooverball is so delightful! Because it reminds us he was just a person. A person who got up at six-thirty in the morning to throw a heavy ball around with his staff, a group they called the "Medicine Ball Cabinet." It shows a side of him that was completely erased by the Depression—a man of vigor, of action, of camaraderie.

It complicates the grim, black-and-white photograph we have of him. It adds color. History is never finished with people. After he left the White House, Hoover lived for another thirty-one years. He wrote books, he served on commissions for later presidents, he slowly, painstakingly worked to rehabilitate his own reputation. He never stopped believing he had been right. But the country had moved on. When we look back at a day like April tenth, we see these threads of legacy being woven and unwoven. We see a martyr like Anthony Neyrot, whose story of failure and redemption is his entire identity. We see a scholar like Saint Cyril, whose words have achieved a kind of immortality.

And we see Herbert Hoover, a man who had one of the most heroic reputations on earth, only to have it utterly destroyed, and then spend the rest of his life trying to piece it back together. It teaches us that legacy isn't a monument carved in stone. It's more like a story we keep telling ourselves, and the details of that story can, and do, change. The things we choose to remember—the humanitarian work, the Great Depression, or even a quirky game played on the White House lawn—define who we think someone was. The past isn't past. We are actively shaping it, every day, by what we choose to focus on.

Hoover’s name is forever tied to the Great Depression, but the game he invented, a symbol of a completely different man, is still played today.