PLAINS, Ga. — Allene Haugabook remembers wearing Jimmy Carter’s pants.
The 93-year-old Plains native was in high school during World War II, when class let out one day so that sugar could be rationed. Haugabook spent the free day at her friend Ruth Carter’s family farm in nearby Archery.
Ruth’s older brother Jimmy was away at college, but Ruth grabbed his plaid button-down shirt and baggy trousers for Haugabook to run around in.
Years later, Haugabook told Jimmy Carter, “If I had known you were going to be president of the United States, I’d have kept those clothes.”
Haugabook — wearing her own pants — drove around downtown Plains on Saturday, curious whether media crews were still around a week after the announcement that the former president had entered home hospice care. She, like many of Carter’s loved ones, expressed mixed feelings about his declining health.
“I hate it, but it’s time for this to take place,” she said.
She didn’t have many memories of Carter at the small country school they attended together, which ran from the first through 11th grades. He is five years older than her.
“We didn’t have any idea he would be president,” she said.
Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, is closer in age to Haugabook, who said she and Rosalynn were both shy girls taken under the wings of the more outgoing Ruth Carter.
Haugabook married in 1955 and moved to Columbus, the first of many relocations with her husband, a Methodist minister who hopped from parish to parish. She worked as a teacher and the couple raised two daughters.
When Haugabook lived in Columbus, she came back to Plains every time Jimmy Carter won a presidential primary, to see him downtown greeting people from the back of a flatbed truck.
“It was pretty unreal,” she said. “You sort of had to pinch yourself to realize this was really happening in Plains, Georgia.”
She and her family took the Peanut Special train to Washington, D.C., for Carter’s inauguration. They attended a ball and stayed at the notoriously seedy Ambassador Hotel, which was demolished soon after.
Haugabook thought her family had the wrong priorities on the train ride home. She remembered saying, “Do y’all realize our native son was made president of the United States, and here we are talking about the hotel?”
Haugabook also came back to Plains when celebrities met with Carter there, she told a University of Georgia interviewer for a 2014 oral history project. She vowed to stop coming around after she was sucked into a mob jostling to see Henry Kissinger.
“I came to see Kissinger,” Haugabook said. “I had been seein’ President Carter all my life, so I wasn’t downtown to see him.”
After they retired, Haugabook and her husband returned to Plains in 1987 to live in her childhood home.
Now, when she thinks of Carter, she feels the strange pain of mourning someone not yet gone. But she said Carter’s wishes are being fulfilled. He always wanted to keep Plains on the map, she said.
He will be buried at his home, which will become a museum after he and Rosalynn are both gone. Haugabook and her husband, 95-year-old CG, could have a new status then.
“When Jimmy and Rosalynn are gone, CG and I will be the oldest in town,” she said. “That’ll be our claim to fame.”
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