This article first appeared in The Atlanta Constitution in October 1983
Lillian Carter, whose homespun charm and occasionally disconcerting outspokenness became forever linked with the image of her son’s presidency, is dead at 85.
Mrs. Carter, who had been in the Americus-Sumter County Hospital for about a week, died at 5:05 p.m. Sunday, according to hospital administrator James R. Griffith.
Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, had been with her since Saturday afternoon, staying overnight in her hospital room and remaining all day Sunday, Griffith said. Lillian Carter’s son Billy and daughter Gloria Spann also were at her bedside when she died.
“The family was all there when she died, and when she did go she knew they were there,” said her doctor, Paul C. Broun. “She was aware of their presence and I think they got to talk for a while.”
Graveside services will be at 3 p.m. Tuesday at the Lebanon Cemetery in Plains. The Rev. Fred Collins of Plains will officiate.
Mrs. Carter, who had breast cancer and a mastectomy in 1981, also suffered from pancreatic cancer, the disease that killed her second youngest child, Ruth Carter Stapleton, in September. Mrs. Carter was too ill to attend her daughter’s funeral in North Carolina.
The grand dame of South Georgia who became the nation’s grandmother, Mrs. Carter always preferred, Southern style, to be called “Miss Lillian.”
“Don’t call me Mrs. Carter,” she once chided a newsman covering her son’s first campaign for the presidency. “That’s Jimmy’s wife.”
During Carter’s campaign and his presidency, Miss Lillian captured the nation’s imagination with her small town ways and an aggressive outspokenness that could, on occasion, alarm as well as delight.
“I’m a Christian, the way I see it,” she told a reporter. “But I do a lot of things the ladies of the church think I shouldn’t do. I smoke when I want to. I take a drink late in the evening. ... There are just so many things that I do that long-faced, dyed-in-the-wool Christians do not do.”
She once told her son Jimmy to “quit that stuff about never telling lies and being a Christian and how he loves his wife more than the day he met her. There are some things you don’t have to go around saying.”
During the 1976 campaign, Bessie Lillian Gordy, who was born in the southwest Georgia town of Richland, became the darling of the press corps. She charmed reporters as she sat in her rocking chair at the Carter campaign headquarters in Plains, signing autographs and chatting in her down-home, outspoken style, often to the chagrin of her son.
When Carter told her he was going to run for president, “Jimmy came into my room one night and said, ‘Mama, I’m going to run for president.’ I was so startled I said ‘President of what?’”
She was born Aug. 15, 1898, the fourth of nine children of James Jackson (”Jim Jack”) Gordy, the local postmaster, and Mary Ida Gordy. She once described her father, who never ran for public office but managed a successful congressional campaign, as “the best, biggest politician in this part of the world.”
The family moved to Plains in 1921, where Miss Lillian began nurse’s training at a local hospital. It was there that she met and became engaged to James Earl Carter, who managed a farm supply store. She later told an interviewer that if she had her life to live over, “I would realize that what I really wanted to be was a doctor.”
But instead she married Carter, and they had four children. The first, James Earl Carter Jr. (Jimmy) became the 39th president of the United States. After Jimmy came Gloria (Mrs. Walter Spann), Ruth (Mrs. Robert Stapleton) and Billy. At her death, she had 15 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
She worked as a nurse throughout the 1920s and 1930s, astonishing her white neighbors by regularly nursing the Carters’ Black farmhands and occasionally receiving Black visitors in her parlor.
Her son Jimmy once called her probably “the most liberal woman in Georgia.”
“I’m an integrationist,” she said. “Jimmy’s father wasn’t. I try to be tolerant of everyone, even people from Alabama.”
In 1953, during his first term in office as a state legislator, James Earl Carter Sr. died of cancer, and Miss Lillian was thrown into shock and bitterness.
“I have never ceased being lonely for him, but I’ve never been lonely for anyone else,” she said later.
She signed on as a fraternity housemother at Auburn University in Alabama and stayed there for six years. She returned to Georgia to manage a nursing home in Blakely, but left two years later, complaining that most of the patients were younger than she was.
In 1966, while Jimmy Carter was making his first run for the governorship of Georgia, Miss Lillian, then 67, saw a televised public advertisement for the Peace Corps. It said that “age is no barrier.”
“She sent off for information and then came in to announce to Billy and me that she was joining the Peace Corps for service in Africa or India,” Jimmy Carter wrote in his autobiography, “Why Not the Best?” “We were not particularly surprised.”
She was appalled by many of the conditions she encountered in India, and her most vivid memory, she said, was of a terminally ill leprosy patient turned out of a hospital to die of starvation in the streets.
“I tried everything to get help for her after I saw her crawling to a mud puddle to drink, and brought bread and clean water to her,” she later recalled.
“And when I told the Indian doctor with whom I worked about it, he simply said it would be better for her to starve to death.”
Whe she learned five weeks later the woman had died, “I thanked God for her death.”
Once day, she said, she went up on a hillside to pray. “And Christ let something come into me and I knew I could do anything. ... I could stay in India.”
When her two-year tour of duty ended in 1968, a tired, much thinner (she had lost nearly 20 pounds) but reluctant Lillian Carter went home.
When she triumphantly returned to India in February 1977 as an official American representative to the funeral of Indian President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed , she was met by 7,000 cheering Indians and told them she was happier during her time in India “than I am now in the president’s plane.”
Credit: Jimmy Carter Library
Credit: Jimmy Carter Library
Never fond of the fishbowl atmosphere of the White House, Miss Lillian often expressed sorrow at the changes her son’s election had caused in her hometown.
Miss Lillian -- who once advised a congressional committee interested in the problems of hunger and population planning, “Don’t retire until you have to. And if you do retire, find a hobby and just keep on living. Don’t get in a rocking chair and rot out” -- lived at home until about 10 days ago, then moved into the Plains Convalescent Home before being hospitalized last Monday.
Her morale was high throughout her illness, said a longtime friend, “until her daughter died. When Ruth died, she sort of gave up.”
Before that, added Jack Watson, another old friend who had served as chief of staff in the Carter administration, “She knew that she was sick and she knew what was coming, but it did not affect her great zest for life,”
During Carter’s first campaign, actor Robert Redford came to Plains to have dinner with the Carter family. As reporters and photographers gathered outside the house to wait for him, Miss Lillian stuck her head out the door and called, “I wish it was Paul Newman.”
During Carter’s presidency, Miss Lillian got to meet Paul Newman and scores of other famous people, many of whom asked for her autograph.
But once, she admitted, “One of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my life is separate Jimmy’s presidency from the fact that he’s still my son.”
