Ford’s WYO Ties

As a Yellowstone National Park ranger during the summer of 1936, Gerald R. Ford worked as an armed guard on a bear-feeding truck, counted visitors’ license plates, and greeted VIPs at the Canyon Hotel and Lodge.

He and his young colleagues rose before dawn each morning to record the make, model, state and license number of every visitors’ car before 7 a.m. According to an article in the Casper Star-Tribune, it took about two hours of running around to list the 150 to 200 licenses parked in the lots. The future president and football star saw it as a great opportunity to keep fit.

He wasn’t so hot about greeting VIPs in the hotel lobby. Ford once told his supervisor that it was "undemocratic and un-American to give special attention to VIPs."

Ford was obviously a man ahead of his time. VIP-greeting and ass-kissing is now a sought-after career path.

Ford died Tuesday at age 93. He’s the only president ever to have served as a ranger in the National Park Service. Ford himself called it "one of the greatest summers of my life." When he became president, Ford added 18 new areas to the national park system.

Most people know about his ties to Vail, Colorado, and its skiing. Ford was a jock and was still hitting the slopes into his seventies. Strangely, Ford’s ancestral ties to Wyoming were strong but he never spent much time here.

His paternal grandfather, C.H. King, was a Wyoming pioneer with businesses in Riverton, Casper, and other central Wyoming towns. His son, Leslie King Sr., married Ford’s mother, Dorothy Ayer Gardner in Illinois in 1912. Their son, Leslie King Jr., was born July 14, 1913 in Omaha.

"In terms of ancestry, he's the closest we've had to a president," University of Wyoming history professor Phil Roberts said in the CST article. "No other president had grandparents who were Wyoming pioneers."

On Dec. 19, 1913, Dorothy filed for divorce because her husband beat her up. King returned to Wyoming to manage business in Riverton, Shoshoni and Arapahoe. Dorothy and her son moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., where she married Gerald R. Ford, who adopted and gave his name to young Leslie.

In his autobiography, A Time to Heal, Ford briefly discussed his parents' short, traumatic marriage. "Apparently, my parents quarreled all that time -- later, I heard that he hit her frequently."

In an essay for the book and PBS series Character Above All, one-time Ford aide James M. Cannon said Ford's mother was at first charmed by the outgoing Mr. King, but soon realized he "was not only brutal, but a liar and a drunk."

Ford finally met his biological father when he was a high school senior in Michigan. Leslie King Sr. Came up to Ford as he worked his restaurant job. According to Ford, they had a "superficial" talk over lunch, and then King, who never paid child support, handed him $25 and left.

He said he was later consoled by his parents, but "nothing could erase the image" of King, "a carefree, well-to-do man who didn't really give a damn about the hopes and dreams of his firstborn son."

Several King family buildings still stand. There’s one that most of us have seen. It’s C.H. King’s former bank building on the corner of Idaho and First streets in Shoshoni. It’s on the National Historic Register and is occupied by a drugstore and ice cream parlor famous for its real milkshakes. It’s one of the few businesses in this town of 500, referred to as a "semi-ghost town" on the Ghost Towns web site because actual people (and not just ghosts) still live there. (Find out more about the town at Wyoming Tales and Trails.)

Next time you stop to get a shake, think about life’s strange twists and turns. What if the King family had returned intact to Wyoming and young Leslie King Jr. (if he lived to survive his father’s drunken rages) grew up to be a Shoshoni businessman? Would he have still become president? Or would he have become the proprietor of an ice cream store in a WYO crossroads?