The residents of Plains like to say they have a pair of famous exports: peanuts and a president.
Jimmy Carter’s name is plastered everywhere across the southwest Georgia town, and many of his relatives live there. A steady stream of gawkers venture off I-75 to soak up the town’s commercial strip and catch a glimpse of the peanut farmer-turned-president.
And though the local politics have turned solidly conservative, many of its 700 or so residents are fiercely proud of their connection to the former president. They regale visitors with stories of Carter sightings, sell reams of memorabilia bearing his name and offer yet another wayward visitor directions to the nearby Baptist church where he regularly teaches Sunday school.
That's why many were stunned and depressed by the news that the 90-year-old who calls their town home – he lives in a gated compound just outside the downtown strip – is suffering from a menacing cancer discovered only after recent liver surgery.
“He means so much to the town,” said Jennifer Jackson, who works at Plains Peanuts in the town’s small commercial strip. “And we want him to recover quickly and soon.”
Our AJC colleague Jill Vejnoska talked to a range of Plains residents after word of the cancer broke Wednesday, and found many were struggling to process the news in their own way.
Jill Stuckey, a close friend of both Jimmy and his wife Rosalynn, said the mood was prayerful.
“We love him here, he’s our friend,” said Stuckey, who often hosts the couple and her next-door-neighbor, Billy Carter’s daughter, at casual Saturday night get-togethers at her house on Main Street. “We’ve been praying ever since we found out about the small mass on his liver.”
Stuckey hadn’t spoken with the Carters since this diagnosis, but she knows the former president as a savvy fighter.
“He’s done everything right. He exercises, he eats right, that’s how he’s gotten to be 90 and (still) going to different continents,” Stuckey said. There’s a history of cancer in Carter’s family, she said “but if anyone can beat it, it’s Jimmy Carter.”
Then there was Lee Kinnamon, a high school history teacher in Americus who last saw Carter was a few months ago at Stuckey’s house. He said Carter was “robust and strong” that evening.
“This is a man who has had a lifestyle of physicality and physical fitness,” he said. “Of course, it goes back to his military training. But he’s also a man of deep faith, and certainly his faith will be very important to him as he faces these trying days ahead.”
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