Jimmy

I met Jimmy Carter once.

When he was running for President, he stopped by our radio station one afternoon during a sweep through Georgia.

It was early in the campaign, long before the primaries and he was considered a long shot to get the nomination. To most Americans, Jimmy was just an old country farmer who stumbled into the Governor’s mansion from a podunk southern state and didn’t have any business in Washington.

He was out to prove them wrong, starting at the bottom. So he was traveling around in an old station wagon, just him and his campaign manager, introducing himself to folks around the state.

I guess when he saw the radio antenna, he decided to wheel in and see if we would let him say a few words on the radio.

It was late in the afternoon and I was there by myself, doing my after school radio shift. I didn’t see his car pull up and because the on-air studio was way in the back of the building, I didn’t even hear Jimmy and his companion come into the building until they knocked on the studio door.

I remember opening the door and seeing him standing there in the hall with that signature grin on his face.

Jimmy stuck out his hand and said, “Hi there, I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President of the United States.”

At first, I was speechless.. Wouldn’t you be? I was just in high school. Barely fourteen years old.

I wasn’t even supposed to be working as an announcer at the radio station. Back then, you were supposed to be 16 years old and a licensed Class C Radio Operator to do what I was doing.

I was neither.

My first thought was, ‘Is this guy with the big goofy grin about to

turn me in.’

After I realized he wasn’t, an even scarier thought hit me. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

This was before the internet and long before the appearance of cellphones so I would not have been able to reach my dad if the Antichrist had shown up at the door and declared that he was going to use the radio station as his base to launch Armageddon.

I did know that this smiley guy was the former governor of our state. I wasn’t stupid. But president?

Lord Jesus, I didn’t have a clue what to ask him about that.

Luckily, his campaign guy was prepared for young ignoramuses like me. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper with a bunch of interview questions that I could ask the smiling candidate.

So, I did what I had seen my dad do. I set him up in the ‘news’ studio next door. We could see each other through the window but he was in one room and the campaign guy and I were in another.

When the record I was playing by Waylon Jennings or Tammy Wynette or one of those old-timey country people finished, I hit the mic and said, “We have in the studio with us today… ah, President… I mean, Governor… ah, I mean… Mr. Jimmy Carter.”

He laughed at my introduction and told me everybody just called him ‘Jimmy.’

I went to the first question on the list, something about the deficit or domestic spending or something. I was a kid. What did I know?

Jimmy smiled and said, “Well, first let me say that I’m running for President but I’m just a humble peanut farmer and nobody in this world makes a better peanut butter than the Roddenbery Family.”

He went on to say how much he admired all of the delicious products made by Roddenbery Foods. And how much he respected all of the hard working farmers in Grady County.

I asked him another question on the list and he just ignored it and said how he has so admired the Cairo Syrupmaker band (I was in the band) and that he went on to say he went to school with Ed Timmerman, my chorus teacher and how he was such a good man.

I could tell that the campaign guy standing behind me was starting to get a little perturbed, but Jimmy didn’t seem to care. He spent the entire 15 minutes that we talked telling me stories about how important farming was and all the people who he knew around here who he admired so much.

When the interview was over, I shook his hand and Jimmy handed me a campaign button with his photo on it and he was off to the next stop.

I heard this week that President Carter was near the end of his life and entering into hospice care and I thought about that day 48 years ago at the radio station.

He had gone on to win the presidency and because of an embargo of oil from some very unfriendly Middle Eastern folks and another group in Iran who decided to take some Americans hostage, his time in the White House was considered to be less than stellar.

It wasn’t until he left office that people saw who the smiling farm boy from Nowhere, Georgia really was.

He became one of the greatest humanitarians there has ever been. And a great example of a person who puts others’ needs before his own.

Jimmy thought he could change the world, not by being a big shot politician but by simply caring for people.

People were always trying to goad Jimmy into saying something that would tarnish his reputation. But he never did.

When someone asked him what he thought of someone’s lifestyle, he simply replied in his Southern drawl, “Well, Jesus loves them so I guess I can, too.”

Some of us ‘Christians’ could sure learn a lesson from that.

My dad apparently caught wind of me talking with a presidential candidate on his radio station while he was out selling advertising, and came screeching into the parking lot just as Jimmy’s car was driving away.

He didn’t yell at me, like I thought he would. Instead, he said I did a really good job for it being my first ‘big’ interview.

And then he asked me what I thought about Mr. Carter.

“Well,” I said. “He doesn’t seem like much of a politician to me. But he sure does seem to love people.”

And he did.

And to me, that’s a much better legacy to leave behind than being just a mere politician.