‘Every person meant something to Jimmy.’ Carter’s hometown prepares for goodbye

It was Tuesday morning and the news people were in town. Some with fancy cameras and uplinks to far-flung newsrooms and studios. They set up shop beneath small tents on street corners. But the news was not so good.

In recent days, word spread that Jimmy Carter, the former president and most famous son of Plains, had entered hospice care. As his people put it in a statement, he hoped to “spend his remaining time at home.”

Home for James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th president, who was born here 98 years and 143 days ago, has in the near-half century since he won the White House come to symbolize more than the mailing address of a world leader with humble beginnings. Plains has — for folks far and wide who are old enough or nostalgic enough to know and recall the rhythms and ways of farm town USA — embodied their hometowns.

And Jimmy Carter, though no longer their president, might well pass for one of their neighbors.

So the story of his return here to live out his days is not so much what Carter has meant to Plains, but perhaps what Plains has meant to him. Or better yet, what Plains, population 750 or so, has meant to America’s heartlands.

In the town post office, in a display case of mementos from Carter’s presidency days, sat a pennant declaring him “Our Best.”

The Carter residence, on Church Street, just over from Rabbit Branch and Cucumber roads, lies almost equidistant from the Alabama border to the west and Interstate 75 to the east.

On Tuesday, as tractors steadily chugged across the rail line in the heart of town hauling wagon loads of peanuts, the town seemed to brace for what lay ahead: Life without Mr. Jimmy.

At one point, a news drone hummed overhead. Everyone was not in the mood to talk. Some, be they camera shy or merely reserved and not wanting to be part of the unfolding story, declined to be interviewed.

A woman at the post office didn’t give her name but spoke of the somber news about Carter, “You know it’s coming. But still it was like he was gonna live forever.”

Another woman, a local, stood outside and spoke of how proud she was that Carter had chosen Plains as “his last stop.”

Shortly before 9 a.m., Eugene Edge Sr. wheeled his pickup into a parking spot at the Plains Pharmacy. He stopped to buy a Coke from the machine out front.

Edge, 80, who once drove logging trucks for a living, said he was fond of Carter. He recalled Carter being “too good” for the politics of Washington, D.C.

“He wasn’t enough of a crook,” Edge said.

Edge also mentioned how Plains and Carter are synonymous, cohorts in a sense.

“He’s tried to do everything he can for Plains,” Edge said. “And it ain’t just Plains. It’s the whole world.”

A block or so south of downtown, seven doors down from the very Dollar General where some say Carter himself has shopped, a man named Albert Mills was preparing to paint St. John AME Church, steeple and all.

Mills, 61, from neighboring Americus, said Carter was down-home to the hilt.

“Every person meant something to Jimmy,” Mills said. “And he was still just like them, an average person. Ain’t no telling what Plains would look like now without Jimmy Carter.”

A woman who lives on the north side of town near Carter’s old high school figured, “Once he’s gone, Plains will be dead. Because you can sneeze and miss it.”

The woman, who didn’t care to have her name printed, said she had also heard that someone close to the former president, upon seeing all the news crews camped out, had said they can go on and leave, that Jimmy Carter ain’t going nowhere soon.

Over outside Bonita’s Restaurant on U.S. 280, the main road through town, Joel Sikes parked his Dodge van and took in the sights.

Sikes had been bound for Florida on Tuesday. He detoured to Plains upon hearing news of Carter’s declining health.

Sikes, 75, grew up in coal country in western Virginia, in a hamlet named Wise. He later worked in city government and as a tax preparer.

“I’ve heard of Plains, Georgia, all my life. I was born and raised in a little town and I said, ‘I’m gonna drive to Plains,’” Sikes said. “I’m a little guy from a little town, and I identify with Jimmy Carter.”