Big Blue Arndt: December 2006 Archives

He was 93.

He is best known, to me anyway, for saving our country the dishonor of trying and/or convicting a (former) President of the United States, by pardoning Richard Nixon.

He was also the only American President never to be elected. He was the first and only POTUS who took the seat upon the impeachment of the sitting President and was appointed by President Nixon to replace Vice-President Spiro Agnew, so he was not elected in that sense either.

Facts follow, including a statement from widow Betty Ford:

"My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age," Mrs. Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband's office in Rancho Mirage. "His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

The statement did not say where Ford died or list a cause of death. Ford had battled pneumonia in January 2006 and underwent two heart treatments _ including an angioplasty _ in August at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

He was the longest living president, followed by Ronald Reagan, who also died at 93. Ford had been living at his desert home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.

Ford was an accidental president, Nixon's hand-picked successor, a man of much political experience who had never run on a national ticket. He was as open and straight-forward as Nixon was tightly controlled and conspiratorial.

President Ford was born in some miscellaneous state, but he was raised in Michigan and regarded my state as his home state. His Presidential Library is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was also an Eagle Scout.

For a more detailed obituary go here.

I remember him from a great deal of productions but obviously he is most memorable to me for being Frank Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond. Strangely, there's also Conspiracy: the Trial of the Chicago 8. I didn't learn much from it. The New York Daily News/Associsted Press had this to say:

He was 71.

Boyle died Tuesday evening at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma and heart disease, said his publicist, Jennifer Plante.

Boyle was beginning to gain notice playing hard-bitten, angry types when he took on the role of the hulking, lab-created monster in Mel Brooks' 1974 send-up of horror films. The movie's defining moment came when Gene Wilder, as scientist Frederick Frankenstein, introduced his creation to an upscale audience, which watched as Boyle, decked out in tails, performed a song-and-dance routine to the Irving Berlin classic "Puttin' On the Ritz."

It showed another side of the Emmy-winning actor, one that would be exploited in countless other films and perhaps best in "Everybody Loves Raymond," in which he played incorrigible pater familia Frank Barone for 10 years.

"He's just obnoxious in a nice way, just for laughs," he said of the character in a 2001 interview. "It's a very sweet experience having this happen at a time when you basically go back over your life and see every mistake you ever made."

When Boyle tried out for the role opposite series star Ray Romano's Ray Barone, however, he was kept waiting for his audition and he was not happy.

"He came in all hot and angry," recalled the show's creator, Phil Rosenthal, "and I hired him because I was afraid of him."