The Other President

Gerald Ford was born in Omaha on July fourteenth, nineteen thirteen, in a house on Woolworth Avenue where his parents were staying with his paternal grandparents. He was not Gerald Ford yet. He was Leslie Lynch King Jr., named for a father who would, sixteen days later, separate from his mother and be absent from his life. His mother Dorothy eventually moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, remarried, and her son took his stepfather's name.

Leslie King Jr. became Gerald R. Ford. He grew up in Michigan, played football at the University of Michigan, practiced law, went to the Navy in the Second World War, and eventually went into politics in Grand Rapids. He served in the House of Representatives for twenty-five years before Richard Nixon selected him as vice president in nineteen seventy-three, after Spiro Agnew resigned. When Nixon himself resigned in August of nineteen seventy-four, Ford became the thirty-eighth president of the United States, the only person to reach that office without winning a national election.

He is also the only president born in Nebraska.

The Woolworth Avenue house where he was born burned down in nineteen seventy-one. The city of Omaha owns the lot and maintains the Gerald Ford Birthsite and Gardens there today, a small green memorial a few blocks southwest of the Henry Doorly Zoo.

Ford lived to be ninety-three years old. He died in December of two thousand and six.