What Was Gerald R. Ford's Real Name?

Having succeeded Richard Nixon after his resignation in 1974, Gerald Ford became the 38th president of the United States of America, serving as head of state for only two and a half years but nonetheless standing out in a number of ways apart from his actual accomplishments. Of course, you'd probably replace "standing" with "tripping," given that infamous incident in December 1975 (via Business Insider) where he fell down the stairs of Air Force One. That helped establish Ford's reputation as an affable, yet clumsy sort, while making him ripe for pop culture parodies from the likes of Chevy Chase on "Saturday Night Live" in the mid-'70s (as noted by Today) and "The Simpsons" in the 1990s. However, there was also the matter of his name, which likewise stood out for reasons other than the fact he was the first president to be nicknamed Jerry.

There's a chance most of you are aware that Ford's successor, Jimmy Carter (b. James Earl Carter Jr.), was the first U.S. president to use his nickname in an official capacity (via Time), paving the way for fellow Democrats Bill Clinton and Joe Biden in the decades that followed. But Ford was also noteworthy in his own way when it came to his name, as Gerald Ford wasn't his birth name. So what was his real, legal name for the first 22 years of his life?

According to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum, the future president was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 14, 1913, the only child of Leslie Lynch King Sr. and his wife, Dorothy Ayer Gardner. The couple divorced just two weeks after their son's birth, and in 1916, Gardner tied the knot with Grand Rapids, Michigan, paint salesman Gerald Rudolff Ford Sr. As a result, Leslie Jr. started going by Gerald Jr., though his birth name remained his legal name until December 1935. That was when he had it legally changed, with his middle name now spelled more conventionally as "Rudolph." By that time, the man most people referred to as Jerry had just graduated from the University of Michigan, where he was a star football player who had caught the eye of two NFL teams that exist to this day — the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions.

Despite finding out at the age of 13 that Gerald Ford Sr. was not his birth father, young Jerry got along very well with his stepfather. As quoted by Adoptions from the Heart, Ford once said that he "couldn't have written a better prescription for a superb family upbringing." As for his biological dad, Ford was 17 years old when he finally got to meet up again with Leslie King Sr. Unfortunately, the meeting left a bad taste in the teenager's mouth; later on, Ford commented that his birth father was "a carefree, well-to-do man who didn't really give a damn about the hopes and dreams of his firstborn son," according to ABC News.