“In October of 1924, in the tiny town of Plains, Georgia, population barely six hundred, a woman named Allie Smith gave birth to a daughter she named Eleanor Rosalynn, and on the same day in the same town, a family named Carter was already raising a boy named James Earl Jr. who was just shy of his first birthday….

surpassing the seventy-three-year record set by George and Barbara Bush to reach seventy-seven years before Rosalynn passed away in November of 2023. They built that marriage in the same modest two-bedroom ranch house in Plains where they had lived before the presidency, returned to it after losing the 1980 election, and stayed there for the rest of their lives. In 1984, carrying their own tools, they boarded a bus in Georgia and rode to