GERALD WHO? –
April 15, 2022 – Once back home in Michigan, Ford married and divorced one of her local suitors. To this day, she remains one of only two divorcée first ladies. (Florence Harding beat her to being the first.) Ford’s memoirs suggest that her first husband may have been an alcoholic, and he slipped into a diabetic coma just as she was on the verge of serving him divorce papers. When he recovered, a full two years later, she called it quits. According to Lisa McCubbins’ biography of Ford, she’d later call that chapter in her life the “five-year misunderstanding.” Soon after, she married local football hero Gerald Ford. He’d go on to embark on a career in Congress, while she became a political wife and raised the couple’s four children until the Watergate scandal propelled the family into the White House.
