When I first visited Plains, Ga., in December 1976, a month after Jimmy Carter's election, the town was buoyed up by various brands of delight—a native son's handmade personal triumph, the daily spectacle of famous TV news faces bolting along the quarter-mile street between Jimmy's house and the heart of downtown, the onset of Christmas.
The victor's formidable mother, Miss Lillian, was freely available at the old railroad depot, dispensing her startling wit and candor. His brother Billy was cheerfully posing for snapshots at the gas pump, permanent beer can ominously poised. Even the President-elect and his wife were visible, making occasional forays to greet childhood friends or to eat at the nearest restaurants—every forkful watched for significance by a merciless post-Watergate press corps. A sizable slice of the citizenry willingly guided the influx of strangers round the sites—Jimmy's birthplace, his country home, his father's simple grave. (The ambitious monuments in the cemetery are not marked CARTER, however, but WISE and FAUST.)
In those few weeks before the Inaugural, the town and its people seemed —from present hindsight, at least—to be the kind of America promised by Ronald Reagan now. Its virtues and vices were personal. Contact was face to face, and the limits on life were human limits: How much do you need? How much can you get? Where do you come from? What color are you? How much will you bear? Can I help any way? Do I want to try?
In the years that followed. Plains made relatively modest changes. A few new tourist enterprises sprouted, stocked to the ceilings with souvenir assaults on the two archetypes of the Carter presidency—peanuts and teeth, neither of which lends itself to much variety of treatment. On the outskirts of town, the state built a welcome center, with vast parking lot and artificial pond. Public restrooms appeared near the depot. There were two shops dedicated to selling good local crafts, and—miraculously and surrealistically —there was a new, genuine French restaurant in an old chicken house outside town that served one-star meals at half the New York price. Larry Flynt began publishing a weekly newspaper, the Monitor, with a crusading editor imported from Kentucky and a G rating; a few other out-of-staters, widely viewed locally as carpetbaggers, set up various tourist scams. But the supply of post-election tourists dwindled fast, roughly as fast as two facts dawned on the populace—that Plains wasn't going to be the Little White House (presidential visits were scarce as summer rains) and that Plains and Jimmy Carter might not be as intimately connected as they'd seemed at first.