Approaching Ann Arbor with the casket of the nation's 38th president aboard, the presidential jet throttled back and then swooped low over fabled Michigan Stadium, giving passengers a view of its cavernous, empty stands and the field itself, looking from the air like a luminous emerald.

Seated not far from his late friend of nearly 50 years, Leon Parma, a San Diego businessman and also a former college football player, found himself overwhelmed with sentiment.

“I was kind of talking to the president – 'We're going down; we're going to see your field,' ” Parma, the 79-year-old chairman of the Parma Management Co., said in an interview.

“It was emotional. In my mind, you can take everything that's been written, said about him in these last few days. That episode would have made him happiest, proudest. . . . You know, this old jock got the ultimate honor – of flying over his football field.”

For Parma, it was indeed the most emotionally intense moment of a journey that began with a call informing him of the 93-year-old president's death on Dec. 26 at his Rancho Mirage home.

Parma was soon at the family's side, first at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, where close friends and family met for a private memorial, and later on the jet – Air Force One when President Bush is aboard – that flew the casket to a state funeral in Washington. Today, Parma will be in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Ford will be buried.

“I'm just so pleased that everything that is being said about him is so positive and about the dignity of the events – just the Jerry Ford types of things,” said Parma, one of the honorary pallbearers. “(He) had no pomp and circumstance about him. He called the situation as it was. He didn't want special things.”

Former first lady Betty Ford, 88, showed remarkable strength from the moment her husband of 58 years died, Parma said.

“She rises to the occasion and always seems to do that,” he said. “She has met the demands very well over the years – before the White House, in the White House and after that time.”

Parma said that he last saw the president Nov. 18, when Ford invited him to watch the Michigan-Ohio State football game on national television. Although Michigan narrowly lost to the No. 1-ranked Buckeyes, Parma said, Ford never gave up on his team.

“He was right in there with every play,” said Parma, a quarterback during his years at San Diego State University. “He was obviously a person who was ill. He was a lot weaker than he wanted to be. He wasn't swimming anymore.”

Parma said he met Ford in 1958, when Parma was chief of staff for then-Rep. Bob Wilson, R-San Diego. Ford was advancing up the Republican leadership ladder in the House at the time. They became friends, with the Fords eventually lured to Southern California as a permanent home by the beauty of the desert and the pleasures of its golf courses.

Ford became vice president in 1973 when the office was vacated by the scandal-plagued Spiro Agnew, and then president in August 1974, after President Nixon's resignation at the height of the Watergate scandal. Parma helped out his friend by serving on a presidential transition committee and then by participating in the inner circle that helped guide Ford during the 1976 presidential campaign that ended in a narrow defeat to Jimmy Carter.

Ford's controversial decision to pardon Nixon a month after the resignation has been widely described as the main reason for losing the election. But Parma said that his friend never doubted the correctness of the decision.

He indicated that the sting of defeat was greatly salved by the fact that some of the fiercest critics of the pardon, such as Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., now acknowledge that Ford did the right thing in short-circuiting Nixon's likely criminal prosecution for Watergate crimes.

Parma noted that Ford, by his own estimate, had been spending more than a quarter of his time on matters related to Nixon and Watergate.

“He did it for the right reason. He was being consumed by it in that first month. They couldn't get anything done. . . . He made a decision that the only hope of getting it out of the way was to pardon him. And it happened that way.”

As for those who suspect that a deal involving a pardon smoothed Ford's path to the White House, Parma said: “He had no obligation to Nixon to do anything. . . . It was a decision he made for the good of the country, and he was right.”