[Gerald] Ford\u2019s early circumstances made him an unlikely future president. He was born July 14, 1913, in Omaha to Leslie Lynch King and Dorothy Ayer King. Not for 17 years was he to learn that he had been christened Leslie Lynch King Jr.<\/p>\n
When he was 2 years old, his mother divorced Mr. King and moved to Grand Rapids, Mich. She remarried, and her husband, Gerald Rudolph Ford, a paint salesman with an eighth-grade education, gave the boy his name in formally adopting him.<\/p>\n
Gerald considered his mother \u201ca human dynamo in a womanly way\u201d\u009d and said she \u201cprobably had more friends than any woman I ever knew.\u201d\u009d He revered his stepfather. Later in life, even in the White House, he would confront difficulty by wondering, \u201cNow, how would he have done this?\u201d\u009d It was perhaps the ultimate symptom of Mr. Ford\u2019s uncommon commonness that he would try to approach the presidency after the fashion of a Grand Rapids merchant. What he respected in his stepfather\u2019s manner was common sense.<\/p>\n
His closeness to his stepfather was deepened, if anything, by the discovery that he was adopted and in particular by a brief encounter with his father…..<\/p>\n