Although Lou Dobbs is one of my favorite TV commentators, I was disappointed to hear him say he thought the funeral services for President Gerald Ford were more in keeping for royalty than for a member of this Republic, despite the high regard in which he holds Ford.

The President and Betty had been adamant about planning the funeral according to the most simple lines acceptable for a State Funeral. The coffin would not be carried on a horse-drawn caisson, but a motorcade, instead. It would be carried into the Capitol through the House of Representatives, where the President had served for 25 years, rather than up the sweeping front staircase, according to Anne E. Kornblut in the December 29th issue of The New York Times. “Hail to the Chief” would be replaced by a somber version of the Michigan fight song.

Despite his misgivings, I am sure Dobbs would agree that the ceremonies paled in comparison with the goodness and beauty of the life they celebrated. Ford was able to heal the nation’s wounds without the disruption of an impeachment of Richard Nixon, because the great man loved the country more than he feared the rejection of those, who would suspect his motive for pardoning his former boss.

A good man, that president of ours. An excellent example of courage, wisdom, and love of people, old and young, rich and poor, learned and uneducated. We can’t help but think Ford would have been as enraged as writer, Lawrence Downed, when he wrote of a performance of little girls in his child’s middle school, recorded in his editorial: “Middle School Girls Gone Wild” in the December 29th issue of The New York Times:

...The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls are hopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not hopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed recreations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hang onto...

As each routine ends, parents and sibblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so ....one-dimensional.

...This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address.

... A teacher in the middle school later told me she had stopped chaperoning dances because she was put off by the boy-girl pelvic thrusting and had no way to stop it – the children wouldn’t listen to her and she had no authority to send anyone home.

....parents allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

During an interview, one of Gerald Ford’s boys told a reporter that the greatest gift his father had given him was his faith in Jesus Christ. It wasn’t a minister or a Bible school teacher; it was his dad, who saw to it that his son would be spiritually prepared for life.

Interesting it is to contemplate what Ford would have said about the above middle school girls’ performance. I think he would have first shaken his head, then marched to the principal’s office to withdraw his children from what old-fashioned Christian parents would have described as “occasions of sin.” Occasions of sin, we might suspect, for the adults, who failed to protect their children from experiences beyond their years.
Thank you, President Ford, for teaching by example that decency was and is a Boy Scout promise to protect our young people, the elderly, the vulnerable among us. It’s not too late to give childhood back to our children.

On January 4, The New York Times ran a four-column black- and- white photo of pilgrims making their way across the bridge, along a grassy area, and up a winding path to the Gerald Ford’s Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, among the 57,000 who came to pay their respect to the man who believed in the goodness of the people he had served so well.

It is a testament to his love of family that when Betty began anew her life of sobriety, he, too, gave up every form of liquor, whether he was with her or with friends at a bar after a game of golf. Such devotion tells us a great deal about the love of this husband for his wife, who, also, stood faithfully and lovingly by his side until death did they part. Or perhaps, just perhaps, they haven’t been parted after all, love being what it is.

God be with you, Mr. President, with your Betty and family, and with us, your grateful fellow Americans. You have done us proud.Amen.

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