Following his years as president, Ford remained active in the Republican Party. Ford later told confidants that his father had first hit his mother when she smiled at another man during their honeymoon.After living with her parents for two-and-a-half years, Gardner married Gerald Rudolff Ford on February 1, 1916. Gerald was a salesman in a family-owned paint and varnish company. Before state events, Ford often had the Navy band play the University of Michigan fight song, The Victors,  instead of Hail to the Chief.Ford graduated from Michigan in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He turned down offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers of the National Football League. Instead, he took a job in September 1935 as the boxing coach and assistant varsity football coach at Yale University and applied to its law school.Ford hoped to attend Yale Law School beginning in 1935. Yale officials at first denied his admission to the law school because of his full-time coaching responsibilities.