Ford, Betty

Betty Ford, the daughter of San Francisco physician Campbell Ford and his wife Sophie, was born in 1912. The Fords soon realized they had a very unusual daughter: She was walking at 7 months, talking with the alphabet memorized at 9 months, and by age 3 was easily devouring books of adult literature (over 750 in the next three years), resulting in a shower of media mentions including Ripley's "Believe It or Not." She came to the attention of Stanford's Psychology Professor Lewis Terman in his study of unusual children; he tested her I.Q. as 188 - about 1/100,000. She was the youngest student e...