I never met Jimmy Carter, but I did meet his mother, Lillian. I was never a fan of Jimmy – he was a moderate Democrat – I’ve always been a Bernie Sanders Democrat. Any economic system that produces as many billionaires as we have—including sports figures and actors—and as many homeless folks as we have at the same time is seriously out of whack, but that’s a story for another time. In any case, I met Lillian Carter at the “frog pond” in Plains, Georgia in the late 1970s.
At the time, I was in my mid- to late-20s; I was working for the Peace Corps as a communication consultant. At one of my first meetings, I asked who were the most famous Peace Corps volunteers that we had, and as staff members were going through a list, somebody mentioned Lillian Carter. At the age of 68 in 1966, she underwent three months of training, was sent to India, and worked for 21 months helping patients with leprosy. Seriously, what mother of a president ever did something like that? This was a no brainer, so we headed to Georgia.
As we exited the plane, a coworker from the Midwest looked at me and said, “Hey Lou, no one looks like you down here.” I was a second-generation Sicilian with curled hair that was a white guy fro. I didn’t need him to say it, I felt it immediately.
Being president has its virtues; in this case, a brand-new highway from the airport to Plains. As we pulled up to the very large Carter home, which was in the center of the very small town, a very polite state trooper informed us that Miss Lillian was at the frog pond waiting for us. We got the directions and took the first right onto a road I thought I would never see. It was hard, red clay with three-to-four-foot ditches on either side, with a significant slope to the ditches, and I had a Midwesterner driving. I immediately began begging him to let me drive; in an age with no GPS, no cell phones, I sure as hell didn’t want to end up in a ditch in rural Georgia.
But no, he assured me he had this under control; he knew where he was going. So, when he realized we were lost, he decided to turn around on that road that looked like it was the devil’s driveway. I said, “Wait, let me get out, and I’ll make sure we don’t drop the back end into the ditch.” But no, this guy just decides to go for it, and what happens? He drops the back end into the ditch.
I wasn’t going to wait on an almost deserted Georgia road for a small-town tow truck driver to show up and see all these foreigners in a ditch. I immediately jumped out; we emptied all the equipment and took out all the bags. Then, the young lady who was our sound tech got in the driver’s seat, and the other three of us pushed. I pushed the hardest, and boom—we were out. Fifteen minutes later, we were pulling up to the cottage at frog pond.
This is when it started to get weird. As I looked out the car window, sitting in the doorway was another Georgia state trooper leaned back in a chair against the door with a shotgun propped up against the cottage. But the thing I’ll never get out of my mind was that the rotund trooper was leaning at just the right angle, and his shirt was cracked open between the two buttons that covered his belly, with his belly button staring directly at me. If he had on an undershirt, I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed; but in this heat, it was just that blue shirt, and it was the biggest belly button I ever saw.
He said he knew who we were, and he got up, belly button still eyeballing me, waited for us to unpack, and as we stood on the porch, he knocked on the door. A minute or so later, Miss Lillian opened the door halfway and took a hard look at all four of us. The first thing she did was lean out and touch my hair while saying “pretty hair” followed by a quick “damn Yankee.”
Continuing in my career-crushing style, I mentioned that I thought we should have freed the slaves and then kicked Georgia out of the Union. She ignored me and said to the sound tech, “What are you doing here, honey? You should be home having babies.” Someone then jumped in and saved it by asking her if she had read her lines for the commercial.
Everyone went to work: we checked out the setting, set up the camera and sound systems, and Miss Lillian read her lines. We were ready for the first take, and I said “Action.” She immediately said Jesus told her to join the Peace Corps, which, of course, was not anywhere in her lines. I yelled “Cut,” and asked her what she was doing. She said she was speaking the truth and it had to stay in the script in some form. I was then, as I am now, a hardcore atheist, but she was so sincere, and what she had done was so impressive that we figured out a way to include it. We left as quickly as we had arrived, carrying a newfound admiration for this remarkable woman. It also gave me a deeper understanding of Jimmy.
Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons of the Interfaith Alliance said it best, “Carter modeled what it looks like for a Christian to engage in politics while steadfastly guarding against theocracy and Christian nationalism.” We can only hope that people like him reemerge in the political realm.
Disclaimer: Lou DiNatale, a veteran pollster/political analyst, and author of this article, is the father of Genevieve DiNatale, the editor-in-chief and founder of News Link Live. Lou is originally from Leominster, Massachusetts. For more information about Lou’s career, refer to his biography below.
