When Gerald Ford came into the world on July 14, 1913, in an ornate Victorian house on Woolworth Avenue in Omaha, Nebraska, he was named Leslie Lynch King Jr. His mother, the former Dorothy Ayer Gardner, had been a nineteen-year-old college student when she met and soon married the well-to-do Leslie King Sr. the previous year. Her infatuation faded fast: she later charged that King punched her at the least provocation. When he flew into another violent rage two weeks after she bore their son, brandishing a knife and threatening to kill both her and the baby, Dorothy packed up her belongings and her son and fled Omaha in the cold glare of an afternoon. That she did so in an era or more that favored spousal battery over divorce bespeaks the steel in the stock behind Jerry Ford.
No comments:
Post a Comment