Marriage and Children
On October 15, 1948, at Grace Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids, Ford married Elizabeth Bloomer Warren (1918–2011), a department store fashion consultant. Warren had been a John Robert Powers fashion model and a dancer in the auxiliary troupe of the Martha Graham Dance Company. She had previously been married to and divorced from William G. Warren.
At the time of his engagement, Ford was campaigning for what would be his first of thirteen terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives. The wedding was delayed until shortly before the elections because, as The New York Times reported in a 1974 profile of Betty Ford, "Jerry was running for Congress and wasn't sure how voters might feel about his marrying a divorced ex-dancer."
The couple had four children:
- Michael Gerald, born in 1950
- John Gardner, known as Jack, born in 1952
- Steven Meigs, born in 1956
- Susan Elizabeth, born in 1957
Read more about this topic: Gerald Ford
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or children:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“It is possible to make friends with our children—but probably not while they are children.... Friendship is a relationship of mutual dependence-interdependence. A family is a relationship in which some of the participants are dependent on others. It is the job of parents to provide for their children. It is not appropriate for adults to enter into parenthood recognizing they have made a decision to accept dependents and then try to pretend that their children are not dependent on them.”
—Donald C. Medeiros (20th century)