Hoover became involved with the Salvation Army to support its fundraising operations in 1937. After the Hoovers left office in 1933 she remained active in women's causes. Soon after the wedding, the Hoovers sailed to China, where Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer. Lou Hoover learned Mandarin and was in Tianjin during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. She served as national president of the Girl Scouts of the USA from 1922 to 1925 and again from 1935 to 1937. During the 1940 presidential election, the Hoovers campaigned on behalf of Republican candidate Wendell Willkie. Hoover died of a heart attack on January 7, 1944, while staying at the Waldorf Astoria New York. She was found by her husband when he returned to their room. The first, a joint Episcopalian-Quaker service in New York, was attended by about one thousand people, including two hundred girl scouts. The second was held in Palo Alto, where she was buried. After her death, her family found many checks she had received to repay her for her charity but which she had declined to cash. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.