California, Michigan services set for former first lady Betty Ford

CNN Wire Service

There will be two services for former first lady Betty Ford next week, a family representative said Saturday.

The first will be held on Tuesday at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, Calif., while the second is scheduled for Thursday afternoon at Grace Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., said Greg Willard, a Ford family spokesman.

Her eulogists will include Rosalynn Carter, the wife of the man who beat her husband in 1976 to become president, and Lynne Cheney, whose husband Dick Cheney was Ford’s deputy chief of staff in the White House and years later became vice president.

Media personality Cokie Roberts, historian Richard Norton Smith and Geoffrey Mason, who is associated with the Betty Ford Center, are also scheduled to speak, Willard said.

The public will be invited to pay its respects at St. Margaret’s on Tuesday and at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids on Wednesday.

Willard said the motorcade routes will also be open to the public.

Ford, a former first lady and co-founder of an eponymous addiction center in California, died Friday at the age of 93. Her husband, Gerald Ford, died in December 2006. He was also 93.

Ford will be interred alongside her husband on the grounds of the museum.

“Her friends here, the people in western Michigan, the people in America and across the world, they are going to say goodbye and … pay tribute to her,” Willard told reporters in California.