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The Piedmont plateau in central Georgia is the most populous region of the state. Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, Augusta, Athens are the population centers, and snaking away from them along the railroads and riverbeds is the ma jority of the state's industry: the textile factories of the Chattahoochee Valley, the more sophisticated automobile assembly plants, mobile home manufacturers, apparel and food-processing plants. The Piedmont gives the state much of its new character—aggressiveness, prosperity, a willingness to homogenize its traditions in search of the economic mainstream. The North Georgia mountains have steeped a third element into Georgia. Life in the beautiful rolling hills of the Appalachians resembles that in Tennessee and West Virginia. With the exception of Dalton (carpet industry) and Gainesville (chicken processing), North Georgia is economically depressed, a region of fiercely individual mountain folk given to such older crafts as quilting, whittling and moonshining.
The Carters of Plains
Straddling this varied state is Governor Jimmy Carter, a South Georgia peanut farmer who is both product and destroyer of the old myths. Soft-voiced, assured, looking eerily like John Kennedy from certain angles, Carter is a man as contradictory as Georgia itself, but determined to resolve some of the paradoxes.
At a conservative speed of 30 m.p.h., a visitor needs just one minute, 43 seconds to drive from the flower-banked eastern boundary of Plains, Ga. (pop. 683), past the covered wooden sidewalks that front the town's eight stores, beyond the huge sign that proclaims PLAINS, GEORGIA, HOME OF JIMMY CARTER, to the water tower at the west-side fringe. There have been Carters in Southwest Georgia for 150 years—cotton farmers, Civil War soldiers, merchants and businessmen.
James Earl Carter Sr. was in business when his first son was born on Oct. 1, 1924. He managed a grocery store, owned the town's icehouse and dry-cleaning plant and later sold farm supplies. Jimmy's uncle was a mule trader, and occasional trips to Atlanta with him to buy mules to work the fields were young Carter's only exposure to nonagrarian society. At Plains High School he played basketball and went to "prom parties," those heavily chaperoned Friday night socials where the boys signed the girls' cards for a five-minute promenade on the front porch.
When he was 16, Carter went to college at Georgia Southwestern, nine miles away in Americus. He stayed only one year; he won an appointment to Annapolis, but had to spend another year at Georgia Tech brushing up on his mathematics. He arrived at the academy in 1943, rushing through accelerated wartime courses to graduate with distinction. After receiving his commission, Carter came back to Plains to marry his childhood neighbor, Rosalynn Smith, and they left Georgia for what was to have been a career in the Navy.
He served in the Navy for seven years, first in electronics, then on submarines. In 1951 he went to work for Admiral Hyman Rickover on the Navy's nuclear-submarine program. For two years he watched over the building of one of the first nuclear submarines and the training of its crew by day and studied nuclear physics at night.