13 Quotes & Sayings By Gerald R Ford

and Dorothy Ayer Gardner. His father was a decorated World War I flying ace from the United States Army Air Service and a successful architect and developer of subdivisions in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His mother was a descendent of Vermont President Oliver Wolcott, through her great-grandfather's sister Harriet Wolcott who was a first cousin of President Thomas Jefferson.

Ford attended the prestigious Cranbrook School, where he became friends with actor Ronald Reagan and others who would go on to form what is now known as the "Cranbrook Group". Both men were members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. In 1931, Ford's father died from complications from a stroke suffered two years earlier after being paralyzed from the waist down from a horseback riding accident at their family farm near Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

In 1933, his mother moved the family to Grand Rapids where she began teaching high school art classes at Central High School and Ford enrolled at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts to study architecture and economics. During his sophomore year he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity but soon switched to an engineering major because he felt that it would help him to become an architect. After graduating in 1936 he attended Yale Law School but dropped out after three weeks because he hated it so much that he decided that law school was not for him and never resumed his legal studies because he did not believe that he could become a good lawyer due to his poor educational background.

During the summers between his junior and senior years at Yale he worked as an assistant engineer at his mother's residential real estate company in Bloomfield Hills because she had developed an interest in real estate investing during her husband's illness and wanted to focus her attention on this aspect of business management rather than on running the office during this time period.