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I had my picture taken with him, my grandfather and my brother at the ABA convention (now BookExpo; Grampa had been ABA president one year)in '79. I think that was the year he published his memoirs.I was eleven and had just gotten braces, so I didn't want to show my teeth. My uncle wanted me to ask his secret service guy to show me his gun, but I told him no, he should ask the guy if he wanted to see it. Eugene demurred, saying it wouldn't be a good idea for a grownup to do that. Ford's given name was Leslie, and I thought about calling him that, but didn't.
My local sports radio station monitors famous deaths and places them in "3 bedroom apartments" in keeping with the "death comes in threes" thing. They closed their last apartment with Ahmet Ertegen, meaning he was the last of the three, although I can't recall who the other 2 were. So I think of famous deaths in this way now.
So far two of the three rooms are filled and we're waiting on the 3rd.
I didn't realise his wife is Betty Ford, founder of the Betty Ford Centre.
You from out of town, stranger? j/k
THERE IS NO TRIO.
We did a "bicentennial" tour of Washington in 1976, and watched him give the speech at Arlington on Memorial Day. That was quite a spectacle (as much as a solemn occasion can possibly be).
My parents split their presidential votes that year -- the last year they did so.
Ford is from Grand Rapids originally (although judging by how much time he's spent here in the last two decades, he didn't like it much) so I'm sure there's going to be a stupid amount of silly public grief in the area.
And as much as I am not a huge fan of his, I'd rather have my airport named after him than, say, Richard DeVos. (*spits*)
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but a friend sent this (yes, stil, another SNL clip!) to me, and it reminded me of that time when everyone's favorite game was to find publicly visible mock-up obituary webpages of people who hadn't died yet.
Just seen this on the news. I didn't realise his wife is Betty Ford, founder of the Betty Ford Centre.
Back when Betty needed treatment for her alchoholism, it still carried the stigma/scandal tag. She used her First Lady status to encourage people who needed treatment to get it and thus established the center. Her wiki says, "...her open honesty in dealing with substance abuse and recovery led to an improvement in how Americans talked about such matters."
Claude Levi Strauss? For someone who was such a big influence in my undergrad years, I'm almost surprised to hear that he's still alive. Meanwhile Clifford Geertz died last month, or so I hear.
and btw, what does j/k mean? Those are my initials, and it's confusing me. Please hope.
The only thing I really remember about Ford is that my third grade class wrote letters to him. It was really exciting getting a letter from the President.
Doohickie - I was looking at that that Wikipedia page this morning and it had been vandalised in a NSFW manner. It was fixed in a couple of minutes later but it was the first time I'd seen something obviously wrong on the site.
I remember Ford from the paperback book of presidents I had in sixth grade. He was the last one in it. We shared a birthday: July 14th. And he was born the same year as my father. I always remembered that.
pie - pretty much everyone is surprised to hear this. It's no wonder really, considering that almost everyone post-him (Foucault, Derrida, Geertz and all the other big names) are dead.
I've sometimes joked that Levi-Strauss got an elixir of eternal youth from one of the savages he met. Or maybe he was turned into a living corpse -- which would explain his structuralist antics (and his apparent obsession with flesh) :7
TheDonF: Whenever someone dies, their page is vandalized within five minutes or so, and for major public figures there's spillover to all the linked pages. The VandalBots help with some and the Recent Changes Patrol does a good job with the rest but they still have to protect articles temporarily (from anon edits, at least). If you happen to see some vandalism like that, it probably was NOT the first vandalism of the day, you just managed to pop in between good edits.
Now that Wikipedia is edging toward the top ten websites, it's part of the way things are now.
Here’s an insight into the thinking of the Major Media Entities, no matter what the format, style or bias. They are all majorly pissed at James Brown and Gerald Ford for dying in the last week of the year. Because all the “Year in Review” stuff was written, produced and otherwise prepared weeks in advance (I have one piece pending weblication that I submitted two weeks ago). Of course, there is also that "three room" thing (never heard it called that before), so media people are probably all sitting at their keyboards waiting for that third shoe to drop. (And, no doubt, all the members of the Right Wing Media are chanting under their breath… “Castro, Castro, Castro, Castro…”) No, Ahmet Ertegen wasn't universally known enough to fit in the same threesome as Brown and Ford (maybe as important as JB, just not as famous for it). Fogelberg? No way. And Roger Ebert may be a stretch, but with all his years in the newspaper biz, if he's in bad shape, he'd do his damnedest to hang on until January 3rd at the earliest.
This kind of bummed me out. My late grandfather knew Gerald Ford fairly well, and always spoke very highly of him.
I also think that Ford was a much better president than most people appreciate, definitely the right kind of person at the right time. He may not have been as flashy as some, but he got the job done. He had the misfortune of making some pretty bad verbal gaffs that the then new SNL (among others) crucified him for, and he had the odd spot of difficulty with airplane stairs, and that whole pardon thing, but nothing really worthy of the derision that The Guardian obituary gave him.
On a hunch I decided to check what a liberal paper had to say about him, so I went to The Guardian site and read their obit, and DAMN were they nasty.
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