Print this articleGrand Rapids, in the shadow of a president
by Christian Bell, Editor in Chief, with photography by Beth Heinen Bell
-
On the night of Ford's death
The hearse coming from the airport
A makeshift memorial
Taking in a president's life
Outside the Ford museum
Eagle Scouts saluting the motorcade
Media trucks cover the Pearl St. bridge
Waiting to see the casket
The crowds viewing the casket
The memorial honor guard
The casket
Waiting to see the motorcade
The motorcade in East Grand Rapids
The president's burial
21-gun salute
On Christmas Eve, my wife and I took a horse-drawn carriage ride through the streets of Grand Rapids. We huddled under a warm blanket and talked about all the familiar sites in Grand Rapids that we knew. After crossing the river, our driver took us on the path around Ah-Nab-Awen Park and up in front of the Gerald R. Ford Museum.
It’s a place we’d been dozen of times before. Fourth of July fireworks. Celebration on the Grand. We’d walked the path in front of the museum the night we got engaged. We had, in fact, parked in the empty Ford Museum parking lot that night and chatted with a security guard who was walking the grounds. As we walked across the pedestrian bridge to Monroe to catch our ride, we stopped for a few minutes to take pictures of the museum across the river. It was a cold, quiet night.
Our horse stopped to graze right in front of a triangular grassy knoll on the north side of the museum lot. A wrought iron fence with brass tips surrounded the enclave. As the driver fussed with the horse, we sat and looked over at the little grassy knoll.
“So where exactly do you think he’ll be buried?” she asked.
“I’d guess back into that hill,” I said. “I hope we’re here to see it.”
Two nights later, I was finishing some work on my computer and getting ready to go to bed when I saw on the front page of Wikipedia a news brief that said, “Gerald R. Ford passes away at age 93.” I raced downstairs to the TV and turned on channel 8. The anchors were going over details of the hour-old news, and the bright red banner at the top of the screen confirmed it: “President Gerald R. Ford dies at age 93.”
“So this is it,” I said to myself. “This is what Grand Rapids has been waiting for.”
Channel 8 had just gotten a camera crew to the plaza outside the museum and begun broadcasting. Someone had already brought a small white candle and set it on the concrete wall surrounding the fountain. I looked around the house for a candle but couldn’t find a nice one, so I grabbed a small red poinsettia and jumped in the car. I pulled into the same parking lot we’d parked in two nights before; a handful of TV news vans were already parked there.
I walked up and set the poinsettia next to the display, which by that time included three candles. A man in a veteran’s hat walked up next to me and set down a fourth candle and a small American flag attached to a wooden dowel. He and I stood and looked at the display for a minute. I walked down to the grass and looked up at the museum. Already a TV crew was running wires and setting up lights. It was as cold as it had been two nights before, and I hadn’t thought to dress very warmly, but I stood for almost a half-hour and watched as people began to show up with candles and cameras. There was a buzz of anticipation, but the night air was still quiet.
Gerald R. Ford was, you’ll conclude if you read all the exhibit plaques and boards in the museum, a fairly unassuming man.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, his parents separated 16 days after he was born and his mother moved to Grand Rapids with her parents. Ford grew up in Grand Rapids, becoming an Eagle Scout and a star linebacker for the University of Michigan who paid his college expenses by washing dishes at his fraternity house. Ford graduated with a law degree from Yale and enlisted in the Navy months later after Pearl Harbor was attacked, serving in the Pacific as an officer on board the aircraft carrier USS Monterey. After returning from the war, Ford met and married Elizabeth Bloomer Warren in the fall of 1948 and campaigned for the first of his thirteen terms in Congress.
For the next 25 years, Ford served the people of West Michigan in a modest role in Congress. Ford never wrote a major piece of legislation, but was credited as being a “negotiator and reconciler.” He became the House Minority Leader in 1963. His one major controversy as a legislator was his involvement in the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In 1973, after Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, President Richard Nixon appointed Ford to be Vice President, although the appointment received little attention in the shadow of the unfolding Watergate scandal. When the full Watergate evidence came to light, Nixon was forced to resign or face impeachment.
Thus, on August 9, 1974, Grand Rapids’ unassuming congressman found himself in the East Room of the White House, taking the oath of office as the nation’s 38th president.
As with the death of any president, there were plenty of ceremonies, processions, and gestures during the week of Gerald Ford’s funeral. A service in Palm Desert, California, where he and Betty had been living. Services on Capitol Hill. Public visitations. A state funeral at the National Cathedral. And at every stop, eulogies, motorcades, and arrival and departure ceremonies.
Many news commentators noted that Ford’s funeral process – the exacting details of which were planned years in advance – was far less ostentatious than those of Ronald Reagan, whose pomp-and-circumstantial ceremonies at times rivaled the best of Hollywood. The contrast was genuine, whether or not Ford himself intended it. At an Eagle Scout dinner he attended some years after the end of his presidency, the dessert course was an ice cream dinner of some elegance. Ford, however, was served three scoops of plain vanilla ice cream. When one of the scouts asked him why, Ford said that he loved vanilla and “didn’t like the other fancy stuff.”
All during the week when events were taking place in California and Washington, Grand Rapids was buzzing about in a fervor. There were parking signs to put up, motorcade routes to plan, Secret Service security sweeps to be conducted. And yet, when it came time to carry the plans out, the execution was seamless and coordinated. There were, for instance, potholes to fill; a City of Grand Rapids road crew truck and two workers were already filling potholes on Pearl Street outside the Ford Museum parking lot at 1:30 in the morning on December 27 – barely two hours after Ford’s death had been announced to the world.
The media’s coverage was coordinated and planned as well. Grand Rapids Press reporter Pat Shellenbarger, who wrote the lengthy and detailed front page story on Ford’s death the following day, had written the bulk of the story long ago, with appropriate gaps left for specific details of the death to be filled in. Likewise on TV: by the time I had turned on channel 8 mere minutes after learning of Ford’s death, interviews and pre-recorded stories were already being looped into the station’s live coverage. While the anchors themselves scurried into the studio, their lines had been written and rehearsed well in advance.
And so Grand Rapids’ playing host to Gerald R. Ford’s funeral and burial went off with perfect choreography; each participant knew their part, performed it with elegance and grace, and drew the audience into the solemn soliloquy.
The real prestige, however, belongs to the citizens of west Michigan.
On a January night where the temperatures barely registered above 20 degrees, thousands of people stood in line – some of them for over six hours – to file quickly and quietly past Ford’s flag-draped coffin. The line was, at times, over a mile long. Some were undoubtedly there for the sheer opportunity of the moment – a chance to see, in person, what many will only ever see on TV. But to stand and shiver for hours upon hours, many more were there to pay a sincere and solemn tribute.
During the motorcades too, thousands and thousands of people lined the streets. I stood at the corner of Patterson and 28th Street for the arrival of the casket from Washington. The crowds grew from a hundred to over a thousand in barely an hour, and that was only on one street corner. The next day, I stood at the corner of Breton and Hall for the motorcade procession from the museum to the church. The crowds were already two to three people deep. Children held up American flags. Adults looked on with quiet excitement as the hearse passed by.
Finally, during the burial, the streets, bridges, and sidewalks around the Ford Museum were packed full of people, many of whom weren’t even close enough to hear or see a single thing going on. Some stood on roofs or hung out of windows. Flags were held high in hands, and a gasp of awe arose from the crowd as wave after wave of fighter jets roared over the skies.
And yet, the citizens who exemplified such pride for an accidental president were themselves quite ordinary. Grand Rapids is, by demographic and marketing considerations, a forgettable place. But such an ordinary city was the hometown of an extraordinary president. Ford’s legacy, particularly his role in pardoning Nixon after Watergate, will be fodder for the debate of historians for decades to come, but his down-to-earth, Grand Rapids-infused character, will hardly be.
Gerald R. Ford was, in so many ways, a representative for all of West Michigan; not just to Congress, but to the whole world. Ordinary. Unassuming. And at a historical moment, unfailing in excellence.
It is probable that Ford’s funeral and burial were an epoch for the city – the zenith of its significance and presence in the mind of popular culture.
In a triangular grassy knoll along the banks of the Grand Rapids, the gravesite of the 38th president casts a shadow of legacy on the city of Grand Rapids. The hometown hero is home, welcomed in marvelous but humble style by his fellow citizens.
Gerald R. Ford wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
Want to respond to this article? Send your letter to letters@kerux.org; see the guidelines for more information.