Young Jerry Ford by Hendrik Booraem

Author:Hendrik Booraem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2013-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

YMCA swim team, 1931; Ford at far left

5 Friends and Fun

Mackinac Island had been a thrill, but Great Lakes adventure was already somewhat familiar to young Jerry Ford. He could remember beach vacations as far back as his preschool years. Almost all of them had been on Lake Michigan, with its white dunes on the shore and cold blue waveless water stretching to the western horizon. When he was small, the big lake was a convenient place for his family to meet the relatives from Chicago — Uncle Jim, Aunt Tannisse, and their children. Cousin Gardie James was nearly his own age; they were mates on the beach and in the water, as snapshots show. They spent time at different beaches on the lakeshore, fishing from docks or splashing in the water.

Jerry remembered learning to swim very early, and he swam constantly from then on, at the beach and at the YMCA. In his senior year in high school he would compete on the Y swimming team.

Ottawa Beach was the place to which the Ford family always returned. It was convenient to Grand Rapids, only thirty miles southwest by a good road, just north of an inlet that led from Lake Michigan to Black Lake (now Lake Macatawa) and the little town of Holland. Many of the affluent Grand Rapids folks owned cottages near the beach. In those years, the cottages looked out directly on the water instead of being separated from it by a huge dune, as they are now. A brisk west wind off the lake would blow beach sand into their front rooms. There was a rather grand resort hotel (until it burned down in 1923) that catered to vacationers from Chicago, who made the trip via a regular steamboat service of many years’ standing. Some Chicagoans owned cottages there. Imposing side-wheelers of the Chicago & Holland line, as well as lake freighters, traversed the waters of Black Lake. South of the inlet there was another beach, called Macatawa.

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