James Earl Carter, Jr., thrirty-ninth president of the United States, was born October 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia. At the age of four, Carter and his family moved to Archery, a town approximately two miles from Plains. It was a sparsely populated and deeply rural town, where mule-drawn wagons remained the dominant mode of transportation and electricity and indoor plumbing were still uncommon. His father, James Earl Carter Sr., was a hardworking peanut farmer who owned his own small plot of land as well as a warehouse and store. His mother, Bessie Lillian Gordy, was a registered nurse who in the 1920s had crossed racial divides to counsel black women on health care issues. Both of Carter's parents were deeply religious.
Carter was a studious boy who avoided trouble and began working at his father's store at the age of ten. His favorite childhood pastime was sitting with his father in the evenings, listening to baseball games and politics on the battery-operated radio. His parents belonged to Plains Baptist Church and insisted that Carter attend Sunday school, which his father occasionally taught. Two of Carter's closest childhood friends were African American, as were two of the most influential adults in his life, his nanny Annie Mae Hollis and his father's worker Jack Clark.
He was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In 1941, Jimmy Caret became the first person from his father's side of the family to graduate from high school. 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, New York, 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.
While on leave in the summers, Carter had reconnected with a girl named Rosalynn Smith whom he had known since childhood. They married in June 1946. The Carters had three sons: John William, James Earl Carter III, and Donnel Jeffrey. They later had a daughter, Amy. In July 1953, Carter's father passed away from pancreatic cancer and in the aftermath of his death, the farm and family business fell into disarray.
When his father died, he resigned his naval commission and returned with his family to Georgia. He took over the Carter farms, and he and Rosalynn operated Carter's Warehouse, a general-purpose seed and farm supply company in Plains. He quickly became a leader of the community, serving on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority, and the library. In 1962 he won election to the Georgia Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966, but won the next election, becoming Georgia's 76th governor on January 12, 1971. He was the Democratic National Committee campaign chairman for the 1974 congressional and gubernatorial elections.
http://www.biography.com/people/jimmy-carter-9240013
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2002/carter-bio.html
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