| Summer, 1967. Two months out of Covington High School. Martin Luther King, Jr., had his people call my people at WBIE radio in Marietta, Georgia, and I soon found myself an arm's length away from the great man in the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Network TV crews groused that I was standing too close to Dr. King, and they weren't about to be upstaged by an 18-year-old radio guy in checked sports coat and narrow tie with a plastic mic and cheap recorder. Hands reached out, elbows jabbed, a well-known network correspondent kicked me in the shins, and I got the rest of the press conference from the outer edge of the pack. Every sound in the room was louder than Dr. King's voice. My boss was not pleased. But, hey, I at least I got to say I (almost) met Dr. King Summer, 1969.Two YEARS out of Covington High School, I was in TV in Jacksonville, Florida, but not exactly at the top of the pecking order. At first, I got the assignments nobody else wanted, such as that time they made me interview the peanut farmer: |
“Who’s Jimmy Carter?” said small, dark Jack Bookout, who looked like Paul Anka.
Dandy Don Lewis, an aging ladies’ man, spoke with his cigarette dangling from his lips. “Isn’t he the guy running for governor against Carl Sanders?”
Our star reporter, Brad Davis whose seriousness was compromised by his page-boy haircut, said, “I’m waiting for a call from the Mayor’s office. Let Randy have Carter.”
Our police reporter, Jack Gould, said, “I’ve got film of a wreck to edit. Let Randy do it.”
News Director/Star Anchorman Bill Grove, who was older than sin, said, “It’ll be good experience for Randy even if we don’t use it.”
Thus, I got my first interview with Jimmy Carter.
Later that afternoon, as I edited the tape, Bill Blackburn, who had more wrinkles than a Chinese Shar Pei, commented, “Who’s that yokel!”
“A peanut farmer,” I said. “Thinks he’s gonna be the next governor.”
“Of Florida?”
“Georgia.”
“Georgia? Why are we covering the Georgia race?”
“Slow news day,” said Bruce.
“He’ll never get elected to anything,” said Harry Reagan, our producer.
"I gave him to Randy," said Bruce.
"Good," said Harry.
The Channel 4/Eyewitness News department used more of this interview on our Christmas party “funny reel” than on the air.
Peanut farmer and former state senator Jimmy Carter came begging interviews from WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, because our signal covered most of South Georgia and he desperately needed the free exposure.
My main question, which ended up on the cutting-room floor, was “How do you expect to win against a well-financed candidate like former governor Carl Sanders?”
He politely answered my question, barely moving his lips as he spoke. “I have a goal of shaking hands with 200,000 people and asking them for their vote.”
“And you think that will get you elected governor?”
“In combination with some other things, yes I do.”
He had broken this goal into small, do-able tasks by dividing 200,000 by the number of days in the campaign, and dividing the days by a certain number of hours; thus, he knew how many hands he had to shake each hour. The man was OCD.
His goal could have been: win the governorship. But that was too all-encompassing. He thought goals should be specific, small things that could be quantified and marked off a list as he accomplished them. Sure, he wanted to win the governorship, but his GOAL was process: shake X number of hands per hour, X number of hours per day, X number of days. Do the process / win the prize.
Carter reached his goal, winning the governorship in a stunning upset.
And he was a very popular man during the days between his surprise victory and the inauguration. And for the first 10 seconds that he was governor...
Many of the voters who had supported him had just assumed that he was a racist like them. But a few seconds after he took the oath of office, Carter said, "Frankly, I say to you, my fellow Georgians, that the time for racial discrimination is over." (He ended up on the cover of Time Magazine for that quote--in some silly story about The New South.)
There was no new South. And the time for racial discrimination in Georgia was not over. (Nor was it over in Florida: our news department was lilly-white. And that was so normal at the time that I never even thought about it till today... this moment... as I write these lines 38 years later.)
With great fanfare, Carter hung a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the state capitol.
From that point on, the redneck-cracker portion of the state hated Carter passionately. And these previously loyal Democrats would become Republicans after Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered and buried in an earthen dam.
I was news director at WGGA/550 in Gainesville, Georgia, during Carter's governorship (in the early ‘70s) and talked with him several times during his visits to our station and on his “listening tours,” during which he strolled around the town square talking to all-comers.
People got suspicious when he continued the listening tours into the final month of his governorship.
I remember sitting at the counter in the Collegiate Grill a block from the courthouse in Gainesville, Georgia, near the end of 1974, and hearing someone ask what the hell Carter was running for now. “The senate,” said a businessman, looking over the top of his newspaper.
“He couldn’t be elected dogcatcher in this state,” said someone else.
Somebody laughed. A guy sitting near me cursed Carter for his liberalism.
The soon-to-be-ex-governor came to the radio station and announced that he was not going to run for the senate, after all. He had decided to run for president.
My co-workers and I tried not to snicker.
He made a guest appearance on the TV show WHAT’S MY LINE? and the panel failed to guess that he was a governor. They didn’t know him even after he told them his name! (Nor did the rest of America. His recognition factor, nationwide, when he began his campaign for president, was less than 1%.)
“Do you have the money to run a presidential campaign?” I asked.
“Not yet. But I won’t need any at first. I’ll travel coach. I’ll spend the night in people’s houses instead of hotels. We’ll do it on a shoestring budget.”
“But how can you win?”
“The same way I won the governorship. I’m going to campaign the same way in Iowa. I intend to shake 200,000 hands. And after I win Iowa, I’ll be the frontrunner in New Hampshire…and it’ll be all over. Nobody will catch me after that.”
He had crunched the numbers and knew just how many hands he could shake per hour and how many hours he could spend visiting barber shops, beauty shops, farms, factories and malls to find those hands.
He didn’t have to worry about his big goal, winning the election, so long as he did all the little things that would add up to success.
The man unknown to more than 99% of Americans, the man who thought he could end racial discrimination in Georgia, the man who stumped the panel on WHAT’S MY LINE?, the man who couldn’t be elected dogcatcher, fulfilled his daily goals during that campaign and, thereby, made his big dream come true, becoming 39th President of the United States.
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02/25/14
Hi Randy,
Enjoyed your Carter blog. I have pictures of myself and Bill Grove at the Thunderbird motel circle room. I'm about to strangle Carter with an old lavaliere mic cord while Grove is patting down his hair for the interview. Carter was running for President at the time. That was a FEW years ago. It was nice hearing from you.
John Thomas
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