R.I.P. Jimmy Carter

His was a life well-lived

I started this writing project a year ago, hoping to recapture a time that I remembered fondly but knew was never coming back again, the 1970s. And with the passing of Jimmy Carter today at the age of 100, it seems like an appropriate time to take stock of that era once more.

I can remember the 1976 presidential election as the first time I was ever aware of politics and the role it plays in our everyday lives. I knew that Gerald Ford was the president, but the whys and hows about that coming to pass had escaped me. Perhaps it was better that way, too. It was as if something was trying to protect me from all the yuck in politics at such an early age. But those realizations were coming, soon enough.

Jimmy Carter was an underdog, a dark horse, a “who is this guy?” who was probably what America needed to cleanse its palate after all of the Nixon stuff went down. His presidency will be forever linked, at least in my mind, with Star Wars and disco and some of the best TV shows that were ever made. If you were there, you know what those were and if not, well, reruns are forever, fortunately.

That era was the last time that baseball was unquestionably the king of professional sports in this country. The NFL was starting its rise in popularity, and the 1979 March Madness game between Larry Bird’s Indiana State team and Magic Johnson’s Michigan State squad marked the rise of basketball to the heights which it now is falling away from. But while Jimmy Carter was in office, baseball still ruled the roost.

It’s a different world now, in so many different ways. For instance, the way I write down these thoughts and share them with anyone who cares to read them simply didn’t exist in the late 1970s. The young kid I was at the time has seen and done so much since then that it’s hard, sometimes, to reckon with just how far everything seems to have come since then. Some of it’s good, and some isn’t so good, but it all keeps on moving, whether we approve of it or not.

So as Jimmy Carter—calling him “James” would feel about as wrong as calling the all-time hits leader “Peter Rose”—reunites with his beloved wife Rosalynn, I wanted to thank him for his leadership through a period of time which doesn’t have any equal, at least not in my mind.