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Louis Armstrong

James Earl Carter, Jr. He is better known as Jimmy Carter. When I first saw James Earl Carter, Jr.'s name, I had no idea who it was. But when I heard that it was Jimmy Carter I knew exactly who it was. He was the 39th president. I didn't know that off the bat but after some very light research I found that out. He served from Jan. 20, 1977, to Jan. 20, 1981. But let's start the Jimmy Carter story at the beginning, the way back beginning.

James Earl Carter, Jr. was born October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, into a family of fifth-generation Georgians. He grew up in the nearby small town of Archery. A fervent Baptist, He is a product of the Plains public school system. After he graduated from high school he attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, N.Y., where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics, and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf, the second nuclear submarine. He would serve under Rickover for the final two years of his career in the Navy, working as engineering officer on the nuclear sub.

He married Rosalynn Smith on July 7, 1946. He met her while he was growing up in Plains. With the death of his father in 1953, Carter returned to Georgia to run the family business. He took over the Carter farms, and he and Rosalynn operated Carter's Warehouse, a general-purpose seed and farm supply company in Plains. In ten years Jimmy Carter proved to be a very capable manager as he grew his family's agricultural business. In addition to his father's peanut business, he expanded by starting a fertilizer business, adding a cotton gin, and increasing...