Reflecting on Jimmy Carter

I met Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1975, when I was president of a small college in Muscatine, Iowa. Our county and the entire state of Iowa were Republican territory. Then, just as it is today, anyone who aspires to become president must begin in Iowa. More than a year before the election, I received a phone call from the Muscatine Country Democratic chairman asking me if they could use the small auditorium at our college for a speech by a presidential hopeful from Georgia.

On the day of the proposed speech, I heard a car door slam in the parking lot outside my office window. I looked out and saw the local Democratic chairman and a smallish man get out of a car and walk toward the front door. I went into the hall to greet our guests. That was the first time I saw that toothy smile for which Carter is so famous. We shook hands, and, while the candidate was at the water fountain, the chairman asked me if anyone had arrived for the meeting. I told him I had been watching the parking lot for most of the past couple of hours and had not seen anyone. He suggested perhaps the meeting would be better in a classroom rather than the auditorium. I told him it could be arranged and, also, I would round up some people for him.

That is how it happened that Jimmy Carter made his first speech in Iowa in a small classroom with two students, two teachers, a custodian and a college president who wished he was elsewhere. Carter noted the small number, put his speech in his coat pocket and rearranged the chairs in a circle. In a few minutes his sleeves were rolled up, his tie was down and he was talking about the issues of middle-America. That same presentation heard by seven people in July 1975 was delivered to seven hundred, seven thousand, and millions over the next 15 months. What was always obvious about Jimmy Carter was he was a genuine, quality individual who, above all, was a very nice man.

Jimmy Carter is not among our most popular presidents, but all need to remember that during his four years in the White House, not one shot was fired in anger by our military and not one soldier was killed on a foreign field. In the 35 years since he left the White House, Mr. Carter has never stopped doing whatever he could to make life better for people here and abroad. We are going to hear much about his contributions through the Carter Center in Atlanta and elsewhere in the months to come as he fights the cancer that has taken over his body.

Our prayers are with him.

Mark Hopkins, a Chaffee, Missouri, resident, is a Southeast Missourian columnist whose work normally appears in the Good Times section of the newspaper.