As NewMexiKen has written elsewhere (I just reposted one item), I had several meetings with President Gerald Ford in the years after he left the White House. On one occasion I helped him go through items in his garage in Rancho Mirage, California, to find things for the Ford Museum.
One of the items we ran across in a garage stuffed full was a mover’s wardrobe holding six suits. These had been packed when Ford left his home in Alexandria, Virginia, to move to the White House when Nixon resigned in August 1974. The whole event was rather unprecedented, of course, and Ford had forgotten the suits packed some four-and-a-half years earlier. He asked that the wardrobe carton be taken into the house.
The next day we ran across another wardrobe with another six suits hanging in it. This time he was more circumspect. He asked that it be taken into the house but, he said, “Don’t let Mrs. Ford see it. She wouldn’t let me keep the suits in the other one.”
The former most powerful man on earth was nervous that his wife wouldn’t let him save some old suits. There was a whole lot of Mr. Ford’s character in that incident, I thought — qualified ego, self-deprecating humor, thrift. All characteristics we might find worthy today if you ask me.
[Among other items we found during the time in the garage was the typewriter Ford said he’d used at Yale Law, and one of his baby shoes.]
OK, so here I am, at your site, a place I try to visit once a day, where I come upon your Ford posts. I had no idea of your history with the former President. Your writing, in turn, reinforced my new understanding of Ford the man that formed this afternoon upon the strength of a single photograph published in today’s Albuquerque Tribune (A-4). Ford sits at his desk in the Oval Office. His right arm hangs down, fingers touching his dog, Liberty, lying by the chair. The expressionn on that dog’s face, pure contentment at the touch of his human, told me all I needed to know about the man.
I have always enjoyed this story. I think you should retell the pen story as well. That’s a fun story also. And, when you have time, tell everyone the Kennedy X-ray story, or repost that one. It might interest people as well.