GRAND RAPIDS, MI — It’s now a famous photo: Two U.S. Army men hold up and inspect one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, found in a German salt mine.

The picture is featured in the closing credits of George Clooney’s new movie, “The Monuments Men,” about the American military’s effort to recover artwork pillaged during World War II.

The man on the left in the 1946 photo is Grand Rapids' own Dale V. Ford, one-time president of Kendall College of Art and Design and former Chief of Design at furniture manufacturer John Widdicomb Co. On the right is Ford’s assistant, Harry Ettlinger, who has a character based on him in the film, Sam Epstein, played by Dimitri Leonidas.

At a recent screening of the movie, Betsy Ford pointed out the photo: “There’s my dad.” She didn’t know it would be on the big screen. She’s pleased.

“If only Dad could have been here to see this,” she says. Her father died 1979 at age 60.

Ford’s widow, Dorothy Ford, 94, resides in a local assisted-living facility. Betsy, 57, is a retired attorney.

Later at her East Grand Rapids home, Betsy spreads out artifacts from her father’s military service. His wartime engineering sketches mingle with scrapbooks of yellowed newspaper clippings. His old Army briefcase is stuffed with lecture materials from his time teaching at Kendall.

“Lost and Found” reads one headline from The Grand Rapids Herald. “Local expert led hunt for looted art.”

She opens a copy of the Roberts Commission, a report about the Army’s work to protect and secure items of cultural value, written in 1946 by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts and presented to President Harry Truman. On the title page, Ford penciled in the page numbers referencing him and his work.

“I always knew this stuff should be kept,” she says. “I’m not sure why. But its time did come.”

Kendall connection

Ford’s past is “a point of pride” for Kendall College, said Anne Norcross, associate professor of Art History and Coordinator of the Visual Resource Collection at Kendall College of Art and Design at Ferris State University.

“It’s great for the art history program,” she said. “All these Monuments Men were connected to art history and design, or they were artists. A lot of them, like Ford, went back into the arts and became major directors at museums.”

Knowledge of the Monuments Men was reasonably widespread in the years following the conflict. As decades passed, it became one of the underappreciated stories of World War II.

A 2010 book by Robert M. Edsel, who contacted Betsy and her mother during his research, inspired Clooney to co-write, direct and star in “The Monuments Men,” which opened Feb. 7. The movie stars Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray and John Goodman, who play fictional interpretations of real people. It focuses on the first seven Monuments Men, artists and historians who went through basic training and ventured to Europe at the tail end of the warfare.

RELATED: 'Monuments Men' movie review: George Clooney assembles cronies to make bold statement about value of art

Ford's role

The movie's plot ends where Dale Ford’s story as a Monuments Man starts. After V-E Day, Ford became one of roughly 350 men and women tasked with sorting through paintings, sculptures, papers and other art objects of artistic and cultural value, and returning them to their rightful owners. The items ranged from famous, priceless pieces – stained glass from the Strasbourg Cathedral, Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece polyptych — to familial artifacts from Jewish homes.

Many were stolen by the Nazis as part of Adolf Hitler’s plan to build the Fuhrermuseum in his hometown of Linz, Austria. Others were hidden so they wouldn’t be damaged during warfare, or end up in Hitler’s hands – Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa" was secretly shuttled to no less than six places throughout Europe. Salt mines became warehouses full of bundled and crated art. Other pieces were hidden in private homes in rural areas.

MORE ON THE MONUMENTS MEN

• The Smithsonian Magazine article from 2008 referencing Dale V. Ford

• Time Magazine: The Real-Life Heroes Who Inspired the Movie Monuments Men: Their Lives in Photos

• History vs. Hollywood: A comparison of fact and fiction in "The Monuments Men"

• A biography of Ford's assistant, Harry Ettlinger, from the Monuments Men Foundation



As for the Rembrandt in the famous photo? Officials stashed it in the mine to keep it safe. It was eventually returned to its home in the Karlsruhe Museum.

"Art is the reflection of the culture that created it," Norcross said. "Hitler's attempt to round up all this art was an act of destroying that culture."



Ford was one of a dozen Monuments Men from Michigan, and the only one from the west side of the state. He was selected because of his background in the arts. Born in 1919, he grew up in Lowell and attended Kendall, where he graduated first in the class of 1939. He studied architecture and design at the University of Michigan before returning to Kendall for post-grad work, eventually becoming the head of the furniture and interior design department in 1941.

The following year, he enlisted in the Army, becoming an officer in the Corps of Engineers. He was deployed to Algiers in 1943, working as a “strategic camouflage officer,” part of an Allied counter-intelligence program to make the Germans think D-Day would occur at Calais instead of Normandy.

He didn’t participate in the fighting, but one of Ford’s penciled notes inside a journal reads, “Had my Jeep shot out from under me by a low-flying ME-109 on New Year’s Eve.” The exact date isn’t noted, but Betsy estimates it to be Dec. 31, 1944. (The ME-109 is Allied lingo for the Messerschmitt Bf 109, a German fighter plane.)

As a Monuments Man, Ford returned art to a German duchess who wept upon seeing her painting again. A Latvian artist was so grateful for his help, he shipped a painting to Ford's East Grand Rapids home five years later as a gift of thanks.

Returning to Grand Rapids

At his release, Ford was a captain. He joined the speaking circuit, sharing his Monuments Men experiences with audiences. He went back to Kendall and served as president from 1946-52, resigning to work at Widdicomb.

"Mr. Ford's tenure at Kendall was marked by constant growth in the size of the student body, the physical plant, and the curricula offered," reads his biography in "History of Kendall School of Design," published in 1978. "As President, Mr. Ford was well known as an efficient, energetic, and enthusiastic administrator who cared about people and encouraged their growth and development and was optimistic about the future of Kendall."

After Ford's tenure at Widdicomb, he became a freelance designer in 1963. He volunteered his time to create the logo still used by Grand Rapids' Heritage Hill Association, and consulted during the planning of the war memorial in Veteran's Memorial Park, co-designing the eagle on the monument.

Illness forced his retirement in 1974, and he died five years later.

Betsy said her father was “not a robust man” and became chronically ill when she was in middle school.

“He was sick for a number of years,” she said. “He passed when I was in my 20s. I didn’t have the depth of experience to know or understand what his time in the war was like. He would talk about what he did in the war, but at that age, I didn’t have the capacity to appreciate the importance of the art (he helped save).

“How I wish he was here to ask about it.”

She said her father was very proud of being a Monuments Man.

“Nothing he did after the war was as important to him.

“He won a lot of awards as a designer. ... He did beautiful work, and my mother still has some of those pieces. But none of that equaled, to Dad, what he did in the war.”

John Serba is film critic and entertainment reporter for MLive and The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at jserba@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.