Nearly 30 years have passed since President Gerald Ford left office, and the man was 93 years old when he died last week. Yet many of us spent considerable amounts of time reading newspaper accounts and watching the people at Ford's funeral during televised coverage over the past few days.

As I flipped from channel to channel during the weekend, I landed on a station showing an old Larry King interview with Ford from 1999. Instead of glancing at it for a moment and then moving on, I sat there and watched the thing for an hour. And I was fascinated by Ford's candor, good humor and common sense during the interview. Reading all the columns about Ford on the Erie Times-News opinion pages in recent days left me wanting more -- just like the TV programs.

In between football games on New Year's Day, I would return every so often to see who was stopping by to pay their respects to Ford, whose body lay in state at the Capitol Building. President Bush and the First Lady stopped by, and a while later there was the president's dad, former President George Bush. Next, the Clintons showed up, and then Sen. Edward Kennedy stopped to chat with Ford's family for nearly 30 minutes. I found myself looking forward to former President Jimmy Carter's eulogy for Ford.

Why so much interest in a 93-year-old man who served as U.S. president for fewer than 900 days? Well, it's history and I felt like I was a part of it. It's the same as last week when a series of front-page articles in the Times-News chronicled various aspects of the year 2006 in Erie. That, too, is a kind of living history. We witnessed the events and felt the effects of the economy, the weather and other aspects of the year gone by. It's interesting to us, I believe, because it's about us. That's precisely what a daily newspaper does every time an edition rolls off the presses -- it chronicles our times.

In the case of Ford, sometimes you reflect back and think: he really was a good, decent man. I imagine that not too many of us have been thinking about the 38th president in recent years. His widow, former First Lady Betty Ford, wanted a quiet, low-key funeral for her husband of 58 years, which is what Ford had requested when he was alive. But Americans had something else in mind. When we have history in our grasp, most of us cherish the opportunity to take a look at the people and events again, before we give it up again.

Because I'm in the news business, I'm acutely aware of how interested most of our readers are in the passing of our nation's leaders -- especially in ones we liked or respected, such as Gerald Ford. It's why we watch, why we read, and most of all why we care.

-- Kevin Cuneo