A kind of memorial
During my second year of college, my roommate, Truman, and I were given permission to live in the law school. Our assigned rooms were full that year of 1941.
Truman, an art major, had an IQ of 155 and found school easy, finished assignments early. It was the time of the gentleman’s C, which I assumed along with later college mates, George W. and Kerry. I missed the beach in California, loafed and spent a lot of time in the swimming pool at the Payne Whitney gymnasium. When finals came around I studied hard for a few weeks and passed all courses.
Our suite in the law school was on the second floor. Across the hall were two healthy looking law students. Everyone was known then by their last names-White and Ford. White was a first year student and had to study all the time for his difficult assignments. Ford was in his final year and had free time, as the courses were easy for him. Ford also worked as an assistant coach of the football team. He had a lot of energy. White was older, a Phi Beta Kappa, All American, had played professional football, won a Rhodes scholarship, and returned to study the law.
Ford became known as “Call me Gerry.” He was frequently in our rooms, bored; I guess a natural friend and fine conversationalist. “Call me Gerry” had been a prominent football player at the University of Michigan, team leader and all around fine fellow. He had the fluid grace of the athlete and the uncommon warmth of a lost friend. It was the “white shoe” era, and most students wore button-down shirts, ties and good sport coats with gray flannels. “Call me Gerry” wore ancient sweaters and ragged, patterned trousers. He was original.
Truman and I were well known for our parties most weekends.
One Saturday late in October, I picked up my girlfriend, a student of Smith College, at the train station and we took a taxi back to the law school quadrangle. Our second storey windows were open; streams of cigarette smoke blew frantically.
When Mary and I got through the noisy, congregated gossips and drunks in the hallway, we saw a kind of pyramid with “Call me Gerry” as the top point, surrounded by beautiful, laughing young women. The more sober Mr. White was in a corner with fewer beauties, but all were impressive. Truman was sketching in another corner, and his girlfriend seemed to have passed out on a sofa.
My roommate had invited the entire cast of a Broadway show that was doing a tryout in New Haven. As we were both under age, “Call me Gerry” had bought the booze for us from a shop in Chapel Street. It was our best weekend.
Then we experienced December 7, 1941 and this crew was scattered. Mr. Ford graduated and passed the bar exam. Mr. White went into the Navy and got his law degree later. I enlisted and Truman became a conscientious objector.
Much later Byron Raymond “Whizzer” White became an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Call me Gerry” was Gerald Ford, later the 38th president.
I read the criticisms of this man. They seemed unfair and wrong. We knew him as a natural athlete, graceful and coordinated, humorous, liked by everyone as a life of the party. He was intelligent enough to get into the Yale Law School, and that was very difficult in the early period when the law school was small and selective. Perhaps his simplicity and naturalness appeared to be a clumsiness or lack of intelligence by critics who did not know him.
O.P. Reed Jr.