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Since he has become President, Ford has visited Grand Rapids only twice. But the Fords keep in close touch with old friends, and Betty has said that she wants to return there to live when Jerry leaves politics. They often lure their old friends to Washington with invitations to state dinners or overnight stays at the White House. He also showers Grand Rapids pals with White House souvenirs—pens, paperweights, letters. Remembering that Mrs. Arthur Brown, wife of one of his former high school teammates, collects elephant figurines, Ford brought her one made of soapstone from his visit to China last year.
For his White House staff, Ford recruited two Grand Rapids cronies: Philip Buchen, presidential counsel, and William Seidman, executive director of the White House Economic Policy Board. Both believe that the President's attitudes and philosophy were molded by his growing up in Grand Rapids, then as now a staunchly conservative, middle-class community that valued hard work, private property and free enterprise.
Seidman feels that the President's economic views were shaped by his home town. "Grand Rapids is not a one-company town," he explains. "It's a town of diversified, relatively small industries. The President's own views on the business world tend to emphasize maximum participation and control by lots of people rather than absentee management and big business. When the President says that America's third century should be the century of the individual, he is talking about Grand Rapids."
Built straddling a fast-flowing stretch of the Grand River, the city is a homey hodgepodge of oldfashioned, squarish buildings and shiny new glass structures, the product of urban renewal projects. Grand Rapids is an amalgam of ethnic neighborhoods. The Dutch, who began arriving in about 1840, hammered together their frame houses on high ground and scrubbed them to a shine. On the other side of the river, the Poles, who arrived at about the same time, made their home and built Catholic churches. The Lithuanians settled in the northeast, the Italians in the south-central section, and far to the south lived the blacks.
Originally the city's economy was built almost exclusively on furniture making by nimble-fingered Dutchmen. Hardwood logs were floated down the river from Michigan's great forests of oak and maple. Later, General Motors put up three metalworking plants in the city, and employment diversified. Yet Grand Rapids has remained a stronghold of the small businessman and artisan. Most of the 38 wood-furniture plants are relatively small; Baker Furniture Co., the biggest, employs only 464 people. Some 375 manufacturing firms have fewer than ten workers each.