The first time I met Jimmy Carter, he was governor of Georgia, and I was at that time a graduate student at the University of Georgia. This was 1973, and it was a Saturday afternoon. I was over in the science building of campus doing homework on the computer and I came down the elevator, and as I was walking through the lobby of the science building that late Saturday afternoon, I saw a crowd of people. And there was Governor, then Governor, Jimmy Carter. He was there in the lobby to dedicate a skeleton of a dinosaur that had been dug up in south Georgia and donated to the science department at the University of Georgia. Before I left the building, I had the honor of shaking Governor Jimmy Carter’s hand.
The second time I met Jimmy Carter was when he was the Democratic nominee for the presidency. This was in the summer of 1976. At that point, I was a graduate student at Penn State University and I was visiting my parents in my hometown of [town name]. Because it was July 1976, and the Democratic Convention had already been held and Jimmy Carter had been nominated as the Democratic candidate for president, but, because the Republican Convention had not yet been held, and it was not yet clear whom Jimmy Carter was running against, he had a time out. And he was down in Plains, Georgia. And that Sunday afternoon, he was playing baseball. He was pitching for the Secret Service team. And they were playing against another government team, I can’t remember which, but before the game began, those of us who had gone to witness the baseball game that afternoon got to shake Jimmy Carter’s hand.