President Jimmy Carter (1924-2024): This Southern Governor Was Elected President in 1976 When Americans Were Hunting Decency to Run the Country

In an all-American sort of way, he was first elected to the local school board. Then Jimmy Carter became President of the United States of America.

Well, not in one move. There were several elected jobs in-between those two important ones, like state senator and governor of Georgia, but school board was a good place to start and President was a good place to stop.

Jimmy Carter wasn’t one for pomp and circumstance. He wasn’t the kind of person expecting to be waited on. Carter did it himself.

Mary Lee and I once encountered him and Rosalyn at Lowe’s in nearby Albany, Georgia, on a Sunday afternoon long after his presidency was over. When we pulled into the parking lot, we saw a long black limousine parked by the garden center. We knew it was waiting on someone important.

Imagine: A former President and his wife doing their own shopping for gardening supplies at Lowe’s.

This same man shopping at a big box retailer in 2002 also won a Nobel peace prize for negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel in 1979.

Contrast that with digging around for Triple-13 fertilizer and garden tools in a big box.

For his whole life, he’d been digging for peanuts in Plains, in Sumter County, in extremely rural southwest Georgia (think Jayess, Silver Creek, Soso, Hatley or Whynot in Mississippi). He grew up there and then went off to Admiral Hyman

Rickover’s Navy, returning home to run the family peanut farm and related businesses when his father came down with cancer.

He had seen some of the outside world while serving in the Navy’s submarines. As President, he saw the rest of it.

On the 700-mile trip home, Rosalyn was so outdone with him about returning to Plains to live that she didn’t speak to her husband the whole way back. “She’d tell Jack (their son) to tell me she needed to stop for the bathroom,” he later told interviewers, laughing slightly.

Later, they’d plunder through Lowe’s.

In that same period, I’d gone to work as a reporter for the Albany Herald where the big box retailer was located. Once, the paper sent me 40 miles up to Plains, population 600, to report on a local controversy involving the former President.

During the trip, I listened for a second time to him teaching his famous Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church that attracted people from across the world.

Afterwards, I interviewed him on the church’s lawn for my article. He was as courteous to me as he’d be to a reporter from the Washington Post.

Later in the day, he and Rosalyn could’ve gone shopping for supplies at Lowe’s or groceries at Winn-Dixie. That’s the way they were.

The hamlet of Plains would remind Mississippians of many of the state’s small towns, especially those from Summit near my hometown of McComb. Summit’s Main Street looks almost exactly like Plains’. Both have a railroad running through the heart of town. Summit is easier to find due to the adjacent interstate highway. Plains is situated in the literal middle-ofnowhere.

It’s a “you better know where you’re going” kind of place.

While living in Southwest Georgia, we delighted in escorting family like my cousin Marie Boyd and friends Charlie and Libby Hewitt to see Plains and the Carters’ unpretentious ranch-style home, his old home place, the serenity of the Carter family farm, the Carter museum, the iconic and familiar auditorium at now-defunct Plains High School, his brother Billy’s service station and to have conversations with merchants along Main Street.

It’s truly remarkable someone from a place like Plains could be elected to the most important job in the world. Then again, it proves you can be anything you want to be if you are dedicated to the goal, no matter the origin of your circumstances.

One analyst said that when James Earl Carter Jr. was elected President in 1976, Americans were hunting decency to run the country.

Mr. Carter was that and much more.

---Mac Gordon is a native of McComb. He is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.