During my recent trip to the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site in Plains, Georgia, I went to see the former president teach Sunday School and had the privilege of having my photo taken with him after the church service. I am nobody special. Mr. Carter teaches Sunday School whenever he is in Plains and the public is invited. Everyone sticking it out through the subsequent church service can get a photo made. There probably has never been a former president so accessible to the public, but then again, that was the basis of Carter’s presidential campaign back in 1976—an honest, average guy, for the people, of the people. Of course, honesty doesn’t get you very far in Washington, and Carter’s unwillingness to “play the game” kept him an outsider within his own administration. He ended up being a one-term president, having a dismal 34% approval rating when he left office. One newspaper wrote that “Carter is widely considered a better man than he was president.”
On the Sunday I attended Carter’s Sunday School class, the 89-year-old man, still in good health, had just gotten back from Tibet. For Christmas he was planning to take the family to somewhere in South America—I can’t recall where. He started his class by telling what he had been doing lately (brokering a peace treaty of some sort in Tibet), discussed a little politics, and then skillfully worked this into his Bible lesson. I got the impression that he wasn’t a fan of Obamacare. He talked about having faith when things looked grim and that things might work out better than expected, “perhaps with Obamacare.” From the moment he began speaking I knew he was intelligent. He attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, later getting a degree in nuclear physics while still in the Navy, and eventually got in on the ground floor with the nuclear submarine program. All this from a country boy who grew up on a farm that had no running water and no electricity for most of his childhood.
I was only thirteen years old when Jimmy Carter became the President of the United States, and seventeen when he ended his one term presidency. He has the distinction of being the first president that I have actual memories of, and now oddly enough, the only president that I have ever met, though I did see President Bill Clinton in Paris. I don’t think my awareness of Carter had anything to do with me being from Georgia, as was Carter. It may just have been that I was of the age at which a person becomes aware of what’s going on in the world. It may also have helped that the most significant historical event during Carter’s term actually played a very small part in my life. I don’t remember much about the energy crisis. I don’t remember much about the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. I don’t remember much about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US boycott of the 1980 Olympics, the SALT 2 Treaty, the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, the deregulation of the airlines, Love Canal, or the Mariel Boatlift. And I certainly don’t remember that Carter deregulated the Beer Industry, making it legal to sell beer making supplies to the public so that home brewing could become an American hobby. But I do remember the 444 days that Americans were held captive in Iran.
I remember that anyone who even remotely looked Middle Eastern caught hell. There was a guy at my high school, I don’t remember his name, but everyone started calling him “The Shah.” If I had to guess, the guy was probably from India, but nobody gave a damn about that. The only thing The Shah had going for him was that he was a pretty big guy himself, because I know he got into a lot of fights. I’m sure that there were Shahs in every school in the country, in every town, in every work place, all of them catching hell just because they looked Middle Eastern. Those were the days long before political correctness; long before a guy could get beat up at high school and make the International news, or even the local news, and then become a martyr for change; long before there was a national policy of tolerance. If you think racial problems are bad today, look back 40 years, and while things still aren’t perfect, the country has come a long way.
I remember that the evening news always ended with a graphic that counted off the days of captivity. Again, this was long before CNN and 24-hour news. Long before 24-hour Internet news, or even the Internet for that matter. Back then you got two shots at news—the morning paper and the evening television news. Local news was at 6 PM and national news at 7 PM. Stories had to be chosen carefully, as there are only so many minutes in an hour, the time allotted to the evening news programs. News stories could captivate a nation for weeks, months, or in this case, 444 days. Today, give any story a week and it’s buried by the next story that will sell more ads or get more clicks. Quality content is no longer king.
But what I remember most of all is that one of the hostages lived in the neighborhood behind me. The man’s name was Colonel Charles Scott, and on the day he returned to Stone Mountain, I and my friends Glen Kolb and Mike Stark went over to his house and knocked on the door to ask if we could get a photo with him. Yellow ribbons were tied around the trees and “Welcome Home” signs adorned the neighborhood of Carlisle. It must have been later in the day, for nobody was around and the neighborhood was quiet. The Colonel was very nice to us and happily took a photo with my friends—as usual, I’m not in the photo for I was the guy with the camera. I remember he suggested that we all join the military when we got older, a suggestion that none of us took. When I got my photos back from the lab, this is what I wrote on the back:
Left to Right
Mike Stark
Colonel Chuck Scott
Glen Kolb
January 1981
The day he came back to Stone Mountain
Colonel Charles Scott with Mike Stark and Glen Kolb (January, 1981)
Welcome Home banner on entrance to Carlisle subdivision in Stone Mountain, Georgia (January, 1981)
Yellow ribbons welcome home Colonel Charles Scott, former hostage recently released from Iran
After doing a search on the Internet for Colonel Scott, I found that he went on to write a book about the event, “Pieces of the Game: The Human Drama of Americans Held Hostage in Iran.”
I also found a couple of articles about him for those interested:
http://cgi1.usatoday.com/mchat/20041025001/tscript.htm (extremely interesting Q&A with the Colonel)
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Last updated on May 2, 2022
