President Gerald Ford died three years ago yesterday. I posted this then.
… 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.]