Waco Resident Leaves $250,000 to Baylor Law School

by Alan Hunt

WACO, Texas - One of the first women to graduate from Baylor Law School, Mrs. Paulanne Ream Hoover, has left the school $250,000 in her will to establish an endowed scholarship. She received her law degree from the school in 1937.
Baylor Law Dean Brad Toben says income from the Paulanne Ream Hoover Scholarship Fund will be used to provide financial aid to full-time students engaged in the study of law. "The recipients will be selected on the basis of financial need and academic achievement by a faculty committee at the Baylor Law School," he said.
Hoover, who died Dec. 18, 1994, at her Waco home at the age of 84, also left some of her personal and household effects to Baylor, including a mahogany conference desk to Baylor Law School, a set of china to the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, and her collection of antique wearing apparel to the Department of Theater Arts.
Earning her bachelor's degree from Baylor in 1932, as well as her master's degree in 1943, Hoover worked as an elementary school teacher in Gladewater and later served as a federal attorney in Dallas, Houston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Upon her retirement in 1971, she returned to Waco. Hoover's husband, Oliver L. Hoover, died in 1967 and they had no survivors.
Toben described her as "a gracious, generous lady and a friend to many." He said she always supported the endeavors of Baylor Law School and other campus departments at Baylor. Hoover was legally blind for many years and totally blind in her later years.