29 December 2006

Half Staff

I was looking down a mountain the other day; I think it was a mountain, or it could have been an airport. I am suffering form holiday dysphasia, and mild case of airport disorientation. There was a large flag at a car dealership or a federal building at half-staff, signifying national mourning.

I wondered if it could be in honor of James Brown, the singer, though it seemed that it would be out of character for the President to honor him in that way, even if the Godfather of Soul's “Living in America” did have one of those driving beats.

It was in another city that I figured it out, the news crawling along the bottom of the screen underneath the terrifying graphic of another monster storm crawling north that threatened to strand me in airport hell.

The flag and the news clicked. I felt that I understood the world around me, briefly. “Of course,” I thought, “President Ford was gone.”


Gerald Ford, Center of the University of Michigan Football Team (1933)

The jet pushed back from the terminal, and there we waited in the snow. I had waited for Mr. Ford once, long ago. It was the night before the general election, November 1st, 1976. I was in Grand Rapids, and so was President Ford.

I was staying my with folks, which the President did not have to do. He had his own place, a suite at the grand old hotel downtown, having represented the people of this largely Dutch congressional district for 13 terms before he had been tapped to replace disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew in the awful slow-motion self-destruction of the second Nixon term.

He was going to cast his ballot the next morning in his hometown to see if he could be elected to the office he held. He had stepped into the Presidency without ever having been elected to it when Tricky Dick took his last helicopter ride away from the West Wing.

I loved Mr. Ford partly because he played football at the Univeristy of Michigan in the 1930s, and despite what comedian Chevy Chase did to him on Saturday Night Live, he was one of the best athletes every to serve as Presidnet. I also liked him when he announced that “The long national nightmare was over,” and though it was not true, it seemed like a jolly way to get on with business.

Governor Carter, the man who looked like he had a mouth full of Chiclets, had his own approach. He was born-again, which was still a new thing in those days, and it was going to be interesting to see if the voters wanted to do the same thing for the White House.

Grand Rapids was, and is, the second city of the State of Michigan. The seventies had not been kind to the old furniture-making town. It had that grand brick look to the downtown, but highway construction and the flight of the mercantile district to the malls of Kent County had left the place down at the heels.

The Secret Service was concerned that there were too many vacant offices in the buildings to permit a parade. There were not enough agents to cover the potential firing positions for snipers.

Being between jobs at the time, I decided to go downtown to the last campaign appearance, which was going to be held at the Pantlind Hotel.

I drove across Fulton in my gigantic Chevy Caprice Classic sedan and easily secured parking. I was hours early, and the hotel was still wide open. Being out of work makes you remarkably flexible, and I walked through the grand lobby, noting that it was a little threadbare, too. The Pantlind had been a beaux-arts gem when it was built in 1913, but everything in the 1970s looked a little the worse for wear.

I blame Mr. Nixon for that, and always will. Standing amid the faded elegance, I wondered what I might do to pass the time until the Favorite Son made his appearance.

Eventually it came to me. I wish I could remember the name of the lounge downstairs. It was a Gay Nineties-themed bar, back before any of that had assumed the new connotation, and I recall that there was popcorn and a television set and the beer was on draft and cold.

There was a color television somewhere behind the dark bar, and some other bar-flied to talk to, and presently I found myself in a perfect mood to attend the rally.

I climbed the stairs from the basement and arrived in the lobby, blinking.

The President had not come downstairs yet from his suite, and although the security cordon had been set, and the red velvet roped placed at the entrance, I was alone.

With the casual air of the inebriated and unemployed, I walked down the corridor to the entrance where the crowd was thronged outside the main entrance. I walked up to the rope, excused myself to the people who had been waiting in the cold, and stood directly in front of the dais where the President would address his fellow Americans.

I recall wishing I had used the men's room before I left the precincts of the bar, and I recall that the President looked tired from the campaign. I also note that it was m first appearance on the national media when I heard my voice in the background on the news the next day.

I vividly recall the words I spoke, clear on the microphones of the reporters who were clustered around. They were, for all practical purposes, the last ones of the 1976 campaign.

“We love you, Jerry!”

Actually, it was true. I voted the next day for the Favorite Son, not trusting the peanut farmer from Georgia, regardless of his born-again status, or because of it.

Mr. Ford did well in retirement, serving on the boards of many very large and important corporations. In the years since I had a career of sorts, and once had occasion to take my sons to visit the Gerald R. Ford Museum on Pearl Street.

Among the permanent exhibits in the museum is a replica of The Oval Office with an audio track that features the voices of actors portraying the President, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as they describe a day in the Ford White House.

Dick Cheney was Chief of Staff, I think, and Don Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense.

The Pantlind is still there, although the bar is not. The AMWAY Corporation purchased the hotel and completely reconstructed it, making the shell of the old building the centerpiece of a new high-rise entertainment complex anchoring a new convention center.

AMWAY specializes in s closed-loop marketing strategy in which family members sell home cleaning supplies to one another, and their co-workers. As best I can tell, it is a Ponzi Scheme like Social Security, only profitable.

President Ford finished up in Palm Desert, California, a fashionable spa east of LA. He will be buried at the Presidential Library, though, finally coming home to Michigan.

He is going to stop through Washington to lie in State at the Capitol, arriving tomorrow morning. The authorities have improved security over the years, particularly since Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme, one of the Manson Family Poster Girls, tried to shoot him in Sacramento.

She is still in jail, thank goodness. It will be a lot harder to get close to Mr. Ford when he lies in state than it was when he was working in politics.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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