Facts About Jimmy Carter That Show A Different Side Of The President

After Jimmy Carter was born, his parents moved into a house on Bond Street in Plains, Georgia. Their neighbors, Allie and Edgar Smith welcomed their first child, Eleanor Rosalynn, on August 18, 1927.

Lillian Carter, a registered nurse, helped deliver Eleanor Rosalynn. According to author and Carter biographer Jonathan Alter:

She was delivered by Jimmy Carter's mother, who was a nurse, and a couple of days after the baby was born, the nurse, Jimmy's mother, Miss Lillian Carter, brought her 3-year-old son over to see the baby.

It would be nearly 20 years before Jimmy and Rosalynn started dating. She was actually very close friends with Jimmy's younger sister, Ruth. Their romantic courtship began in 1945 and, while Jimmy knew he wanted to marry Rosalynn, she initially turned him down. She was concerned they were moving too fast. 

Jimmy Carter graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1946 and was then assigned to the USS Wyoming. He spent two years on surface ship duty before applying for submarine duty. Carter trained in Connecticut at the US Navy Submarine School in 1948.

Once his submarine training was complete, Carter was sent to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was assigned to the USS Pomfret. The Pomfret monitored waters in the western Pacific before being sent to San Diego. 

By 1952, Carter decided he wanted to take part in designing and developing nuclear propulsion systems for submarines. Stationed at this point in New York State, Carter's experience with nuclear technology made him an ideal individual to send to Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, when the nuclear reactor there had a partial meltdown in late 1952.

Carter and his crew went to Chalk River to clean up nuclear material in the aftermath of the meltdown and to dismantle some of the reactor's parts. This required the men to run into the reactor briefly to carry out their work. 

The men went in for 90 seconds at a time. According to Carter's book, Why Not the Best?

I had only seconds that I could be in the reactor myself. We all went out on the tennis court, and they had an exact duplicate of the reactor on the tennis court. We would run out there with our wrenches and we'd check off so many bolts and nuts and they'd put them back on. And finally when we went down into the reactor itself, which was extremely radioactive, then we would dash in there as quickly as we could and take off as many bolts as we could, the same bolts we had just been practicing on. Each time our men managed to remove a bolt or fitting from the core, the equivalent piece was removed on the mock-up.

By the time the job was complete, the men had all been exposed to as much as 1,000 times the amount of radiation allowed in the 21st century. Carter said in an interview in 2011,

We were fairly well instructed then on what nuclear power was, but for about six months after that I had radioactivity in my urine. They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages and they didn't know.

James Earl Carter Jr., son of Lilian and James Sr., was the oldest of four children. When his mother, Lillian, was ready to give birth to her first child, Dr. Sam Wise delivered the child. Lillian was a nurse and worked for Dr. Wise and, on October 1, 1924, helped bring the future 39th President of the United States into the world.

Lillian Carter later told Jimmy that Dr. Wise delivered both him and his brother, Billy. She said, “Gloria was born while we were still in town, and Ruth was born after we moved to the country. Both of the girls were born at home - you and Billy in the hospital.”

Carter wasn't the only future US president born in 1924. George Herbert Walker Bush was born in June 1924 in a bedroom in his family home in Milton, Massachusetts. Joe Biden was born next after Carter in terms of birth order and was born in a hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania. This means Carter was the first future US president born in a hospital. 

In 1979, Jimmy Carter followed through on his calls to conserve energy in the United States by installing solar panels at the White House. 

There were 32 solar panels in total and they were used to heat water. At the dedication ceremony, Carter said:

In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy…. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.

This was what happened. The solar panels were removed by the administration of Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan. When they were removed in 1986 - by which time the White House had also pulled funding for renewable energy in the US - the panels were sent to Unity College in Maine and installed in 1991. They remained there until 2010, after which they were placed in storage, gifted, or restored by students. 

At least one of the panels is now held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

When Jimmy Carter was Governor of Georgia, he helped create what he called the “Hollywood of the South.”  Carter realized that giving tax breaks and other incentives to filmmakers to come to Georgia was a potential money-maker for the state. He recalled, 

We would do anything that was legal… Sometimes we would stretch the law to make it easy for them to make the films. Burt Reynolds came down here several times and made Deliverance in Georgia during that time, and made The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit, and different things. 

Part of Carter's initiative involved the recreation of the Camera Ready Communities Program. This linked up producers and county representatives to discuss permits and other resources. By the last year of his governorship, Carter said there were roughly 26 films made in Georgia. 

Carter's successor, Governor George Busbee, dismantled much of this work and even tried to restrict what kinds of movies could be shown in Georgia. This led to temporary boycotts of the state by motion picture producers, though that didn't stay permanent considering Atlanta's reputation as a modern production center for all sorts of movie and TV projects.

Jimmy Carter was a music lover. He was on friendly terms with Elvis Presley, enlisted the Allman Brothers to kick off his presidential campaign in 1974, and invited Willie Nelson to visit the White House during his time in office. 

When it came to Nelson's visit, however, Carter likely got more than he expected. Carter was a very big fan of Willie Nelson, playing his music often.  When Nelson visited the Commander-in-Chief, as the musician wrote in his autobiography, he "smoked pot… [with] one of the servants” at the White House. President Carter later learned it was “one of my sons, which he didn't want to categorize as a pot-smoker like him.”

This revelation came out in a documentary about Carter called Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President.  The actual person Nelson smoked with on the roof of the White House was Carter's son, Chip. Nelson was sheepish when asked about it in 2015, admitting, “could have been, yeah.” Chip's name later came out and, when reporter Chris Heath contacted Chip afterward, the President's son said, “Well, [Nelson] told me not to ever tell anybody.” 

By the time it was all investigated, the culprit was clear - it had been Chip on the White House roof with Nelson.