| President | Gerald Ford |
| Location | Omaha, Nebraska |
| Operated By | City of Omaha Parks |
| When Visited | July 31, 2018 |
| Who With | Solo visit |
| Presidential Significance | This is the spot where Gerald Ford was born. |
| Pre-Visit Reading | TripAdvisor |
Omaha Nebraska has everything! It has this cool history museum in an old Art Deco train station. It has a bridge where you can stand in Nebraska AND Iowa at the SAME TIME. It also has 40 other attractions that ranked higher than Gerald Ford’s birthplace on TripAdvisor’s list of Things to do in Omaha when I visited a couple years back. Well, technically 39. There was a small park with some pinoneer statues that somehow had two separate TripAdvisor entries that each individually ranked higher than Ford’s birthplace.
Since it’s been a while, I recently checked TripAdvisor to see how Ford’s birthplace was faring these days. On the current list (ranked by traveller reviews), Ford’s birthplace was no longer ranked below a generic entry for “Gift and Specialty Shops” and had even inched up to #40, which was encouraging. However, it still is not as popular as a placeholder entry for Omaha Steaks (#29) that reviewers use as a place to vent about their online meat orders, or a random rock (#32) that has acquired a social media following after someone put it in a strip mall parking lot to disrupt curb-jumpers (see this article for more details on this phenomenon).
But I say never mind whatever else Omaha has going on (and I must say, Omaha was way cooler than I thought it would be). As for Presidential history sites in Omaha, Gerald Ford’s birthplace is clearly #1! It’s probably also the entire list.
Ford was born in the home of his paternal grandparents in Midtown Omaha in 1913. Originally named Leslie Lynch King, Jr., he only lived in Nebraska for 16 days, when his mother moved him to Illinois, and eventually Michigan, to escape a domestic abuse situation. Ford was later renamed after his stepfather and the house he was born in was torn down after a 1971 fire. Efforts to turn the spot where the house used to be into a memorial began in 1974, once Ford was President, and the site was dedicated by Ford himself in 1977.
The memorial is situated in a quiet residential area and I easily found a spot to park in front of a small apartment building around the corner. The small park consists of an area with a memorial (see the pic at the top of this post) and another section set aside as a rose garden.
The memorial had various marble slabs memorializing various people. The central slab was dedicated to Ford, of course, while other slabs paid homage to other dignitaries such as full lists of US Presidents (minus Trump, even though he’d been in office 1.5 years) and mayors of Omaha. It all looked nice, but it did seem like the site was perhaps a little overzealous in all its memorializing.
The rose garden side of the park, dedicated for former First Lady Betty Ford, had clearly seen better days. There were roses, yes, but they seemed a little sad and the larges circular area at the center of the rose garden was not very glorious. And this was in the middle of the summer, not during the colder months. There were other areas, however, that did have cheerful flowers, suck as by the busts of Gerald and Betty Ford in the rose garden area.
The other key feature of the park besides the memorial and the rose garden was a kiosk that served as a kind of mini-museum displaying Ford memorabilia. Around the exterior of the kiosk were four glass panels protecting different displays. There was one dedicated to Ford’s athleticism, one for Betty Ford, one about Ford’s presidency, and one pertaining to the memorial and the house that used to stand there. The displays were, I thought, a nice touch, but I do remember the kiosk being visibly dirty.
Overall, this was a nice little park and a nice way to end the day and a half I spent in Omaha, a city I was surprised to find I really liked. The site was much grander than any other Presidential birthplace markers I have seen where the building was no longer there (for example, see my post on Benjamin Harrison’s and Bill Clinton’s birthplaces). It’s especially remarkable considering this was for a President who resided in the state for little more than a fortnight.
The one downside was really that the park could have been kept up just a little bit more. It wasn’t as if there was no maintenance at all, but perhaps the upkeep could be stepped up a notch. Maybe just hit the kiosk with some Windex a little more often and plant some more flowers in the rose garden, that would do a lot. However, even as is, the Gerald R. Ford Birthplace and Gardens is worth a stop next time you’re in Omaha.