PLAINS, Ga. — As a mother of 10-year-old twins, I have spent what feels like a lifetime protecting my children from “bad examples,” the kind of people you’d give anything for your children not to know about, let alone emulate.
For much of their lives, that’s included walling them off from many politicians they see on TV. One example I’ll never have to hide is Jimmy Carter.
That’s not to say Carter wasn’t as ambitious as other politicians — he was. He rose from the Sumter County School Board to the Georgia state Senate, the governor’s mansion and the White House — all by the time he was 51.
And it’s not that he didn’t make mistakes — he counts plenty in his own books and public statements.
But of all of the honors and achievements Carter has collected, from winning the Nobel Peace Prize to working to cure diseases to negotiating peace accords, his greatest impact may ultimately be the example he has set — someone who is simple, humble, and kind.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in Plains, Ga., the little Southwest, Ga. town where he grew up, where he returned after leaving the White House, and where he lives today. Along with former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who is also from Plains, Carter lives in the same one-story brick ranch that the couple built in 1961.
Three miles away from Plains sits the Carter family farm where the former president was raised, for many years without electricity or running water. The family’s spare, white clapboard house still stands today, next to a coop for chickens and fields for mules, goats, and row crops like peanuts and cotton.
Half a mile west of Plains stands Maranatha Baptist Church, where, over the years, the sanctuary became a classroom for the hundreds of Sunday school classes Carter taught following his presidency, even into his 90s.
Jan Williams was Amy Carter’s grade school teacher and plays the piano at the church. She is also one of many who helped to manage the Sunday school crowds who traveled each week from around the country, and occasionally from around the world, to see the former president.
“Mister Jimmy used to tell us in Sunday school, this whole world can be better if everybody will just be kind to the person in front of you,” she said.
“He never forgot where he came from, and he’s such a wonderful example to young people if they’ll study him and to people who are my age who have watched him live.”
Back on Main Street is the stately white Victorian home where the Carters often sat for dinner, elbow-to-elbow at the kitchen table of the late Dan Ariail, then the pastor of Maranatha, and his wife, Nelle.
“We were friends from the first time they came over for dinner,” Nelle Ariail said.
Together they built Habitat for Humanity homes across the country and in Mexico, where the Habitat group, including the Carters, slept in tents between long days of building stucco homes.
The former president also invited Ariails to travel with him to Norway when he won the Nobel Prize.
“He came to us during breakfast at the hotel one morning and apologized that he had not spent much time with us,” she remembered. “I thought, ‘My goodness, all of these dignitaries are here and you’re apologizing to us?’ But that’s just how they are.”
Back in town this week, visitors wandered in and out of the shops on Main Street, a strip so compact you can walk from front to back in about 60 seconds.
At the Buffalo Cafe, Tim Buchanan rang customers up for lunch. His eyes welled with tears when he thought about what could be next for President Carter.
“Their just such amazing people. Growing up with them, and knowing them my whole life, it just feels like family. They are family, to everybody in town,” he said. “That’s just Plains. That’s who we are because we’ve tried to live by their example.”
Two doors down, at the Plains Trading Post, the owner Philip Kurland talked about the time Carter sat with him for an hour when he was too sick to stand to greet the former president.
“Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter came in to welcome us to the community and they never stopped coming,” Kurland said. “For years he would come in almost weekly just to see how we were.”
Jan Williams said there was never any doubt in her mind about where the Carters would live after he lost the presidential election in 1980.
“I asked him, ‘What are you going to do when you’re not president anymore?” Williams remembered. “He said, ‘I’m coming back to Plains.’ I knew it would become a ghost town if he didn’t.”
Over the course of his life here, Carter has made differences large and small. He’s taken the people of Plains along with him on the incredible adventure his life became. And he’s taken steps to make sure it survives into the future, deciding to be buried in Plains to ensure visitors continue to come to town even after he’s gone.
Shortly after Carter announced his terminal brain cancer diagnosis in 2015, Josh Zembik and his then-girlfriend, Meredith Shiner, traveled from Washington, D.C. to Plains to attend Carter’s Sunday school for the first time.
To make sure they got seats in the sanctuary, they slept in their car along with Josh’s parents. They brushed their teeth in the parking lot and changed clothes in the dark, careful to make sure they were presentable enough to meet the president and first lady.
“I will never forget finally reaching them, seeing their smiles, feeling the warmth, and seeing his left hand on top of her right, and wondering how on earth anyone could get between the two of them even if they tried,” said Zembik.
Zembik and Shiner have since moved to Chicago, married and had a baby, a little boy they named Carter, after the man whose example they hope their son might follow someday.
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