Curator recalls meeting with President Ford Museum played recordings of president on the day of his burial BY TOM CAIAZZA Staff Writer CURTESY OF THOMAS EDISON MENLO PARK MUSEUM Above: Jack Stanley (l) and former Edison Mayor George Spadoro (r) accompany former President Gerald Ford as he makes a recording on the Edison Fireside Phonograph on Nov. 10, 1999. EDISON — On the day Jack Stanley met former President Gerald R. Ford, he was struck most by his modesty. Stanley, the curator of the Thomas Alva Edison Museum, met Ford at his Rancho Mirage, Calif., home in November 1999. The president had agreed to make three recordings of himself — on the wax cylinders Edison himself had invented — as part of the museum’s program to preserve history on Edison’s historic technology. “He was a gentleman,” Stanley said. “I recall him a gentleman first and politician second. There are certain things that we call nature’s gentlemen. He was from small town America. He had that kind of belief, he had that kind of demeanor.” Stanley said that Ford’s legacy will be that of someone willing to be “the sacrificial lamb” for the America he believed in. Ford’s pardoning of President Richard Nixon cost him re-election, but Stanley, and history at large, views that act as healing the country, and Ford as a man who saved the presidency. SCOTT PILLING staff Left: Jack Stanley, curator of the Thomas Edison Menlo Park Museum, holds the phonograph cylinder that was recorded on by Gerald Ford. “When you see in this age of party politics,” Stanley said, “... how people are more influenced by polls ... it’s a refreshing thing to think of someone who was willing to do what was right, rather than what was popular.” Stanley recalls President Ford talking about his role in the Warren Commission which conducted the official investigation into President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He spoke of late night walks with Kennedy and the Nixon pardon. It was a conversation Stanley relished. Ford was the president Stanley was most eager to record because he felt his entire presidency was historic. “He saved the presidency, as far as I’m concerned, in many respects,” Stanley said. “He was a sacrificial lamb.” Stanley said Ford joins the annals of history alongside men and women like President John Quincy Adams who would “rather be right than popular.” The recordings of his voice are the closest things to a time machine human beings can claim to own, Stanley said. These recordings are even more profound because they are “made by the physical force of the being who created them,” meaning, it was the force of Ford’s voice, not the technology found in the device, that created the sound. Stanley considers that a profound notion. When Stanley recorded the late Peter Jennings as part of the same project, he said there were only two signed photographs on the journalist’s desk. One was of Gerald Ford. When asked why Jennings, who could conceivably have a photograph of just about anyone he wanted gracing his desk, chose Ford he said: “I liked him because he had guts.” Ford was laid to rest this week on the grounds of his Presidential Library in Michigan. To honor the late president, Stanley and the Township of Edison held a ceremonial playing of the recordings at the Edison museum.