As America fell into the Great Depression, the Bloomers were still more fortunate than most, as there was always food on the table, and Betty was even able to continue dance lessons.
Along with dance, she still loved sports, especially playing football, and when she was in seventh and eighth grade, she was part of an all-girl football team that played the boys in neighborhood sandlot games. Having grown up alongside two older brothers, Betty played to win. It never occurred to her that the girls couldn’t beat the boys—and often they did.
The year she turned fourteen, Betty began teaching ballroom dance classes to younger children for fifty cents each, to help contribute to her upkeep. It was half the price Calla Travis charged—she was only fourteen, after all—but the money she made allowed her to continue her own lessons with Miss Travis. The Bloomer house at 717 Fountain Street didn’t have a space big enough, so Betty rented the basement in her friend Mary Adelaide Jones’s house for $1. Her buddy Wally Hook would come and play the piano—she paid him $1 too—and sometimes Mary Adelaide’s brother, Walt, would join in with his saxophone or drums, providing the background music as Betty taught her young students how to fox-trot, waltz, and tango. Word got around, and the Betty Bloomer Dance School flourished.
That same year, she got a part-time job at Herpolsheimer’s Department Store as a clothing model. “Herp’s,” as everyone called it, was a fixture in downtown Grand Rapids at the corner of Monroe and Ottawa Streets, with ten floors of home furnishings, housewares, jewelry, and clothing. As a teen fashion model, Betty’s job was to stroll through the tearoom on Saturdays at lunchtime, wearing one of the latest ensembles. With her dancer’s training, Betty was a natural model. She’d stop at each table, allowing the ladies to feel the fabric and observe the stitching.
“Twenty-five ninety-five. Third-floor sportswear,” she’d say, spinning around.
“Talk about personality; she had it,” recalled one of her first supervisors at Herpolsheimer’s. “Everyone liked her. She was one hell of a gal.”
Betty earned $3 a week and developed a real sense for fashion. Her friends admired her knack for turning something simple into something fabulous. One friend recalled how “she could come down the stairs in a basic blue dress that she had dressed up with a bit of green grosgrain and look like a million dollars.”
When she entered the ninth grade, Betty attended Central High School, which was just a few blocks from her home. She participated in all sorts of extracurricular activities, such as the Sock and Buskin theater group, the vaudeville ensemble, the high school yearbook, and Gamma Delta Tau sorority—a social club whose members were known as the “Good Cheers.” Given the choice between studying and socializing, though, Betty preferred the latter.
She had a large circle of friends—the girls liked her, the boys liked her—and she was just plain fun to be around. “She was very popular with the boys,” Lilian Fisher recalled. “There’d be several of us who would sort of wait and see who was asking her for the Friday and Saturday night dates, and then see who was going to be left over for us.”
Betty loved the attention, but she wasn’t one to settle down in a long relationship with any one boy. She admitted that, for her, it was all about the pursuit.
“I would set my cap for somebody and work at it until I got his fraternity pin,” she wrote. “As soon as I’d got it, I was satisfied, and I moved on to the next victim. I was scrupulous about giving the last fellow’s pin back, that’s the only good thing I can say for myself.”
She also expected boys to be courteous and respectful, and wouldn’t put up with boorish behavior. One night she went to a dance with a boy named Bill Warren. He was three years older, good-looking, with curly blond hair and a fun personality. At one point during the evening, though, he left her to go out in the parking lot and have a beer with some other boys. When he returned, Betty was fuming. As he held out his hand for her to dance, she slapped him in the face.
“You’re no gentleman,” she scoffed. “Don’t ever bother to call me again.”
Every so often, Betty and some friends would drive two and a half hours east to Ann Arbor to attend a University of Michigan football game, where one of the star players was a young man named Gerald Ford Jr. from Grand Rapids. Jerry Ford, five years older than Betty, had grown up on the west side of town in more of a working-class area than where Betty lived, and while she had never met him, she knew of him. Everybody in Grand Rapids knew the name Jerry Ford.
In 1930, when Betty was still in junior high school, he was a senior at South High School, and captain of the football team. That year, Jerry made the all-city and all-state teams, and his name appeared often in the sports pages of the Grand Rapids Herald.
Ford went on to play center for the University of Michigan, with number 48 on his blue-and-maize jersey. In 1932 and 1933, the Michigan Wolverines went undefeated with back-to-back national titles, and the following year, senior Jerry Ford was named the team’s Most Valuable Player.
In 1934 Betty was sixteen years old, and one afternoon, she and some of her girlfriends went to a gypsy tea-leaf reader, just for fun. The fortune teller went around and looked into each girl’s cup, supposedly able to see how their lives were going to turn out. “You’ll meet a tall, dark stranger,” she said to one. “Many children are in your future,” she proclaimed for another. When it came Betty’s turn, the gypsy peered into Betty’s teacup and then made a statement that was so different from all the others, and so striking, it took Betty by surprise.
“You will be meeting kings and queens and people of great prominence,” the fortune teller said with conviction. Then she looked into Betty’s eyes and added, “You will have an extraordinary life.”
With dreams of becoming a professional dancer, Betty took the gypsy’s words to heart, and envisioned herself performing in London and Vienna, Austria. She could never have imagined in her sixteen-year-old mind that yes, she would meet kings and queens, and people of great prominence, but it would be on the world stage, and the partner by her side would not be a dancer but a tall, blond, former football player from, of all places, the west side of Grand Rapids. While that would be decades later, something the tea leaves did not predict—a sudden tragedy—was just around the corner.
It was a hot, hot day in July 1934—one of those hazy summer days when the humidity made everything feel heavy. Betty and her girlfriend Ev Thompson had been out driving around town in Ev’s convertible with the top down. As they came wheeling up to Betty’s house, Ev was honking the horn, and they were both “waving and yelling and showing off the way sixteen-year-olds do,” she wrote.
As the car pulled to a stop, the front door of the house swung open, and Betty’s twenty-year-old cousin Shine came running outside.
“Shh!” Shine said, waving her hands. “Just calm down.”
Betty could tell by the look on her face that something was wrong. “What’s happened?” she asked.
Shine hesitated and then said, “They had to take your father to the hospital.”
As the details came pouring out, Betty could hardly believe what she was hearing. A couple of her parents’ friends from Detroit had stopped by the house a few hours earlier to visit her mother and dad. Hortense invited them in and went to find William. He had gone out back to the garage to work on the car. And that’s where she found him.
In the stifling heat, one can only imagine the horror Hortense felt when she found her husband’s lifeless body and saw the key in the ignition, the car emptied of gas.
A police ambulance took William to nearby Butterworth Hospital, but “efforts to revive him were of no avail.” The official cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning, and it was ruled accidental. The next day, on what would have been William S. Bloomer’s fifty-eighth birthday, a front-page article in the Grand Rapids Press noted that he had been unemployed for several months after losing his job at the Corduroy Tire Company plant.
“He’d gone through the Depression and lost ever
ything,” Betty’s brother Bill recalled. “I can remember vividly the pain that he showed from not being able to do everything.”
Still, Betty’s brothers would never admit what others speculated—pointing to the fact that the insurance claim was paid and no inquest was made by the coroner—and it wouldn’t be until many years later, after the pain had dulled, that Betty herself would acknowledge it was likely her father took his own life.
Friends and family members came by to pay their respects, and when the funeral was held a couple of days later in the Bloomers’ living room, Betty overheard hushed voices discussing something she had never known or even suspected: her father had been an alcoholic. Her mother had kept it a secret from her, and Betty never witnessed it, for he drank only when he was traveling. But now, all those job changes, and moving the family from city to city made more sense. It’s likely that William Bloomer had trouble holding down a job, and that’s the reason Hortense insisted on settling in Grand Rapids, near family.
In 1934 alcoholism was far less understood, and the word alcoholic conjured up images of a destitute man, lying filthy in the street, drinking straight from a bottle in a brown paper bag. To learn that her father had been an alcoholic would have added a feeling of shame on top of the devastation of his sudden death. There was no counseling; no one dared broach such subjects. It was a lot for a sixteen-year-old girl to handle.
“It was rougher for everybody after that,” Betty wrote. “Because he was gone, and we’d loved him.”
Financially, there was insurance money to help the family get by, and her brothers, who were already in their twenties, had jobs, but eventually Hortense, too, needed to go to work. She got a real estate license, and just went out and did it. Betty would recall what an impression that made on her—an example of “how independent a woman can be if she needs to be.”
After William’s death, the bond between Betty and her mother grew even stronger—they depended on each other and had a very open dialogue about everything, including sex. Hortense explained to Betty that sex was “beautiful,” but instilled in her that it was something to be experienced only after marriage. Whenever Betty went out to a party or a dance, her mother used to wait up for her to come home, and Betty would tell her all about the evening—who she danced with and what the girls were wearing. In an interview later in life, though, Betty admitted that she didn’t always tell her mother everything. “I told her what I wanted to,” she said with a grin.
In high school, she didn’t smoke or drink like some of the girls—although she would ask her dates to light a cigarette so she could just hold it and look as though she were smoking like Bette Davis—and if anyone handed her a cocktail at a fraternity party, she’d simply pour it into the nearest potted plant.
Hortense continually pushed Betty to do her best and was quick to point out when she knew she hadn’t. One night, after a performance in the high school follies, in which Betty admitted she “did sort of a sloppy job,” her mother sat her down and said, “If you don’t do it well, don’t do it at all.” That consistent message, expressed with love and encouragement, inspired Betty to strive for perfection in everything she did. Now with her father gone, it was especially important for Betty to make her mother proud.
In the spring of 1935, the year before her senior year in high school, Betty graduated from the Miss Calla Travis School of Dancing, with top marks across the board for attendance, technical terms, original waltz, examination, and senior dance composition, and now she was qualified to be an instructor herself.
That year, a curly haired little actress named Shirley Temple became a sensation as she sang and tap-danced her way into the hearts of moviegoers, appearing in uplifting films such as Curly Top and Bright Eyes. She was a breath of fresh air to a people beaten down by economic woes, and every little girl under the age of ten suddenly wanted to be just like her. With Shirley Temple dolls, Shirley Temple dresses, and Shirley Temple look-alike contests across the country, there was an influx of girls signing up for dance lessons at Calla Travis’s school. Betty became the main instructor and the girls idolized her.
Lilian Fisher’s younger sister Edith, whom everyone called Toto, was one of Betty’s students at that time. “We had black patent tap shoes with grosgrain ribbons to tie them, and velvet dresses,” Toto remembered. Betty would get out and demonstrate what it was like to dance with a boy, and “she was so beautiful, so graceful, and so nice. That lovely smile, that soft manner. You wanted to be just like her.”
Betty loved teaching the youngsters, but her dreams went beyond being a dance instructor in Grand Rapids. She was desperate to pursue a professional career in New York and begged her mother to let her go as soon as she graduated high school. Hortense wasn’t about to allow her only daughter to move to New York City at such a tender age, but eventually she promised that Betty could go once she turned twenty. It wasn’t what the teenager wanted to hear, but she respected her mother’s decision and continued teaching dance and working at Herpolsheimer’s through her final year of high school.
That year, Miss Travis invited an official from a program at Bennington College to visit the studio and evaluate the senior dancers. A short while later, she informed Betty that out of everyone at the school, Betty and her friend Mary Snapp had been chosen to attend the elite Bennington School of the Dance in Vermont that summer. It was the chance of a lifetime, and Betty was thrilled when her mother agreed that she could go. At eighteen, it would be her first trip far from home, and an opportunity she believed could change the course of her life.
2
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The Martha Graham of Grand Rapids
When Betty arrived in Bennington, it was like she’d entered a whole new world. Nestled in the southwest corner of Vermont, with the Green Mountains on one side and the Taconics on the other, the Bennington College campus was made up of a dozen or so stately brick Georgian buildings surrounding a vast swath of lawn, from which you could see for miles and miles across rolling, wooded hills. It was serene, and yet a creative energy permeated the campus.
The Bennington School of the Dance had been in operation only for a few years and was the first program of its kind. By being associated with a college, the school offered a legitimacy to modern dance—which was considered avant-garde, if not downright bizarre, to many—and strived to have its students pursue dance as an art form rather than as a component of physical education. The school’s instructors were top names in the dance world—Martha Hill, Doris Humphrey, Louis Horst, Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham—people Betty had been reading about in dance magazines for as long as she could remember. Being able to learn from the masters was a dream come true.
Betty felt like she had been “born to dance,” and at Bennington, she found herself among girls from all over the country who shared the same passion. Her roommate was a bubbly girl from Connecticut named Natalie Harris, whom everyone called Nat, and who would remain a lifelong friend. All the girls had nicknames: Mary Snapp was Snappie, and Betty, who flounced around in a favorite nautical cap, became Skipper. For six weeks, “We breathed, we ate, we slept—nothing but dance,” Betty would recall forty years later when she returned to Bennington as first lady. “Oh, what a glorious feeling!”
The modern dance students were divided into three groups according to previous experience, with group three being the most advanced. Betty, despite having ten years of dance experience, landed in group one. There was still so much to learn.
Breakfast was at seven fifteen, and then, beginning at eight, the morning session included Dance History and Criticism, Elements of Music, Basis of Dramatic Movement, and Dance Composition. After a break for lunch at one, the afternoon sessions included Percussion Accompaniment, Techniques of Modern Dance, and Modern Dance Movement. Betty soaked in the information like it was water, scrawling detailed notes in a stack of spiral memo books—one for each class. But it was Martha Graham, who taught for two weeks in the middle of the program, who m
ade the biggest impression on Betty. A pioneer in the establishment of American modern dance, Graham was well on her way to becoming one of the principal choreographers of the twentieth century, and Betty hung on Martha’s every word. Betty memorized her meticulous notes and practiced until the movements became automatic.
“Martha Graham Technique: Most important point stressed by Miss Graham is pulling up straight of the body between the pelvis and the bust,” she wrote in her notes.
There was a precise way to do everything. Stretches: “Sit on floor up straight. Place bottoms of feet together in front of you. Hang on to ankles and for 16 counts bend forward and touch head to feet with a bouncing movement.” Swings: “Stand on left foot, starting with right foot back, swing right foot forward and back from hip, swing arms in opposition to leg. Swing hard enough to pull yourself off the floor by the pendulum swing of your leg. Hip does not open for the swing.”
In between classes, the girls bounced around the lawn trying to pick up as much grass as possible with their toes—an exercise ordered by Graham—and which prompted a local newspaper article entitled: “Bennington Campus Seethes with Women Who Jump in Odd Fashion.” In the evenings, there were rehearsals and tryouts for special groups, and often they’d stay up all night to perfect a movement. The days were so strenuous that at times Betty’s thigh muscles knotted up so much that she couldn’t flex her knees, the pain so bad that to go down a flight of stairs, she had to sit on her bottom and slide down, step by step. But still, being able to dance eight hours a day was “ecstasy.”
Martha Graham was in her forties at that time, and Betty “worshipped her as a goddess.” Her mere presence was riveting. She saw Martha’s body as “a beautiful instrument” that she used with remarkable strength. When she did an extension, she’d be up on the ball of one foot, and the other leg would be straight up behind her head.
Betty Ford: First Lady Page 3