We have team coverage tonight
on this developing story.
Coming up, Liza Lucas will
share more of the reactions
surrounding today's announcement.
Don White caught up with
Atlanta Mayor Dickens,
but we begin with John Sherick live
in Plains with more on the former
president and his connection to this
legendary small Georgia community.
Planes, of course,
is Jimmy Carter's lifelong home.
Born here October 1st 1924,
grew up on a farm just down the road,
graduated from Plains High School,
went off to college,
Georgia Tech and then the US Naval
Academy met Rosalyn Smith here.
They married here in 1946 and he
was seven years into his naval
career helping found the nuclear
Navy when in 1953 his father,
James Earl Carter Senior died and
Jimmy Carter made the decision to leave
the Navy and come back to planes.
To take over the family's peanut warehouse
and wherever he was in the world,
wherever he was across this
state or even in Sumter County,
he always came back to planes,
and one of his priorities
was to teach Sunday school,
and he did so regularly since 1981.
After he left the presidency,
he came to Maranatha Baptist Church to
teach Sunday school did not stop until 2020.
He did not let anything get in the
way of his Sunday school lessons,
not recent health challenges.
Not cancer, not a broken hip.
He always came back to Maranatha
Baptist Church until the challenges
of the COVID pandemic and his
age were just too much.
But people would come from around the
world and across the country to listen.
How many of you think if you do a
good thing or just one other person,
you would make America a better country?
Is that complicated? It's not difficult.
Jimmy Carter sharing his faith in church,
as he did so often, everywhere,
everywhere he went in his own way.
And as messages of support come
in from around the world for
Jimmy Carter and his family,
now no one outside his family,
it's safe to say,
has felt a greater impact and loves
Jimmy Carter more than his friends
and neighbors here in Plains. Jeff
John, when I first introduced you,
when I saw you pop up on the
screen with that backdrop,
I I felt a little bit of a lump in my throat.
It's one of the most famous shots,
live shots in television of the
American 20th century in politics.
That shot where you're standing
right now was so famous for all
the networks in the mid late
70s all the way into 1980.
It's a it's a very symbol of
the man in many ways.
And it was at this spot where Jimmy
Carter returned after leaving the
White House, January 20th, 1981.
He flew straight from Washington here to
planes and there were hundreds of people
here to welcome Jimmy and Rosalynn back home.
And so it's been a very he was
in tears and gratitude is been a
very important place for him.
And of course, he started the
Carter Center in Atlanta in 1982.
And when they built the facilities,
he and Rosalynn had an apartment there
in Atlanta where they would live.
As they went around the world,
fighting disease, promoting human rights,
monitoring elections,
consulting with world leaders,
but again, planes was his home.
People would see him riding his bicycle
throughout planes he would run errands.
And then just down the street at his home,
he would paint he he was a Carpenter,
he was a poet.
He was a writer,
a historian, and,
and he consulted world leaders
from his home here in Plains.
He felt most comfortable here at home.
And
John, you're about 50 yards away
from Brother Billy's gas station,
and you think about his role through
those Carter years in the White House
and Miss Lillian and his sister Ruth,
and it just goes on and on.
It is incredibly vivid for those of
us who are old enough to follow the
Carter presidency at that time and
his amazing ascension from planes.
Sometimes people say what is planes like,
who haven't been there,
who are not from the South.
If you really want to get a sense of how
amazing the United States is and how
amazing Jimmy Carter's life has been,
spent some time in that area
of South Georgia.
So much grinding poverty,
so much that he has risen toward
and through to become the 39th
president of the United States.
And all the moving parts in his
life of we will be talking about
for days and days and weeks and
weeks and and certainly for years
and years in this country.