‘We love you. Have a great week. See you next Sunday.’ More stories of Rosalynn Carter

When Michael Ankerich would walk into Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains each Sunday, he would be greeted by Rosalynn Carter who, “...offered her hand and a cheek for a greeting kiss.”

After church ended Ankerich would hear her say, “We love you. Have a great week. See you next Sunday.”

“Sitting with Ms. Rosalynn and Mr. Jimmy was like sitting with my grandparents decades ago,” Ankerich told the Ledger-Enquirer.

Ankerich said the Carters helped reintroduce him to his Baptist roots. Ankerich said he began attending Maranatha Baptist Church in the Fall of 2016 after the presidential election.

“I was in a place where I needed someone like President Carter to reassure me there was hope in humanity in spite of the contentious and angry dialogue coming from that period,” Ankerich said.

“The church welcomed me as one of their own, but no one more so than the Carters,” he said.

Ankerich described Rosalynn Carter as “quite chatty” and would often lean over and say that she loved the hymn the church was singing or that a particular Bible verse meant a lot to her.

“Many words describe her, but compassionate is at the top of the list, followed closely by devoted,” Ankerich said.

After his father died in 2020, Ankerich received a phone call from the Carters offering their condolences. He said that Rosalynn told him about the pain she felt after losing her own father.

After saying he was now an orphan after losing both his parents she quipped, “We’ll just adopt you as our own.”

Ankerich described Rosalynn as approachable, kind, gracious, and incredibly resilient and said, “She was the epitome of what it means to be a Southern lady: genteel and made of steel.”

Even years before he got to meet her he sent a letter as a college student to Rosalynn Carter asking advice for a young person starting out in the world.

Ankerich said she responded, “Set your goals high and work to achieve them. Never be afraid of failure, for the tragedy comes, not in failing, but in never having tried to excel.”

The Gray-Power activist

When former Ledger-Enquirer publisher John Greenman left the paper in 2004, he joined the University of Georgia as a journalism professor occupying a chair endowed by Jimmy Carter’s cousin Don Carter.

The two shared the same grandparents and same social concerns.

Greenman said he and his wife Alice Budge were not close to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, but often circled within their orbit, feeling as if they were neighbors.

Budge’s mother, Evelyn Watts, was a Carter campaigner who in the presidential election of 1976 helped deliver St. Petersburg, Florida and its Pinellas County for Carter’s victory.

“She was a gray-power activist,” Greenman said, and Carter never forgot her contribution. Beyond appointing her to commissions, the president from then on regularly sent her handwritten cards and White House mementos for keepsakes, he said.

“Rosalynn was like a co-president,” Greenman said of the First Lady, whom political analysts compared to similar figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton. “She was recognized by Jimmy as his partner in everything.”

She will be remembered for her work to alleviate poverty, improve care for the elderly and particularly for those affected by mental illness, he said: “She was a First Lady with an agenda.”

Connected by art and culture

Cathy and Fred Fussell of Columbus were involved both in the Westville living history village once located in Lumpkin, before it was moved to Columbus, and the Pasaquan art compound visionary Eddie Owens Martin created outside Buena Vista.

The Carters supported both, they said, once serving on the Westville board and backing Pasaquan’s effort to get a wooded buffer around the property from timber company land.

The Carters liked to bring guests to visit Pasaquan, they said. “They would come just for fun and bring their families, even in recent years,” Cathy Fussell said. “They were always interested in any kind of regional art or culture.”

Fred Fussell said Martin, the late artist and fortune-teller who called himself St. EOM, once warned Carter he would not win re-election, of Carter’s 1980 opponent Ronald Reagan saying, “He has a full head of hair and a mean line of talk.”

No time to eat

Paul Pierce was the director of the Springer Opera house for over 35 years and hosted many events in which the Carters attended.

He said one memory he held of Rosalynn Carter was during an event in support of Historic Westville that was hosted at the Springer.

Pierce said, “Ms. Rosalynn didn’t have time to get anything to eat. So, apparently she just kind of kept visiting with people.”

Pierce said he was talking with the former president when he looked across the room and saw Rosalynn at a table by herself, “...really chowing down.”

“My impression at the time was like she hadn’t eaten all day and she was by golly going to take this opportunity to get something to eat,” Pierce said.

Another fond memory of the Carters was when Pierce secured an appointment at the Carter Center to discuss how to turn the president’s children’s book into a play. Amy had illustrated a book by her father called ‘The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer’ about the President’s time in the Navy at sea.

“We were in his office an hour or so. After about 30 minutes, Rosalynn came in and started talking about her memories about the sea tales and Amy’s book. We had a great visit and they were great to talk to,” he said.

Pierce had brought a photo of him and his family with the Carters and asked them to sign it. But the pen Rosalynn used started leaking and she was a little embarrassed. But Pierce said the ink did not damage the photo hardly at all.

“It actually makes the photo a bit more precious,” he said.