When Jimmy Carter came to Hickory in March 1976, he was one person in a large field of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
The future president’s visit to the region included a stop in 鶹ý where he “burst into fluent Spanish to the surprise of a 鶹ý crowd and accepted a basket of peanuts from a Girl Scout, ‘That are about as good as the ones I grow,’” according to Hickory Daily Record reporting from the time.
He then came to Hickory where he addressed a crowd at Lenoir-Rhyne University — then known as Lenoir-Rhyne College — estimated at 1,600 people.
The future president received a favorable response from the crowd, particularly after he said: “Don’t vote for me unless you want to see the entire executive branch overhauled completely.”
Other topics of Carter’s remarks included a pledge to prevent the damming of the New River and to beat primary rival and Alabama Gov. George Wallace in the North Carolina and Florida primaries, which he would go on to do.
Mitzi Gellman, now the executive director of Habitat for Humanity of the Catawba Valley, was among the 1,600 people who showed up for the rally. She was a high school student at the time who took photographs of the rally.
Gellman spoke about how much pride she took as a 17-year-old in seeing someone from the South leading a serious campaign for president.
“I just was fascinated by someone at the time who was from the South running for president,” Gellman said. “I used to tell people, you know, ‘He sounds like us when he talks, and I like that.’”
Another Hickory resident, Doug Auer, also noted the significance of having a candidate from the South.
During the 1976 election cycle, Auer was at two events with Carter in his role as a member of the Democratic Party committee of Tompkins County in upstate New York.
Auer said people who lived in the Northeast were arrogant about the South. They did not think much about the South and their perceptions were shaped by television shows such as “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Hee Haw,” he said.
He said Carter helped challenge some of those preconceptions.
Regarding his own initial impression of seeing Carter, Auer said: “He was articulate. I was like, ‘Wow, didn’t expect that.’”
Auer added, “The arrogance of the North still exists to this day. I mean, there’s no question that sort of the anti-elitism of Southern, white, rural Americans is still born out of that age where we didn’t really pay attention.”
Gellman also credited Carter with putting “the mission of Habitat on the map” through his decades-long involvement with the organization.
“He’s definitely made just a huge impact on fundraising and visibility, and at the end of the day it’s all about how many houses, how many families can we move from poverty housing to some kind of standardized, decent housing,” Gellman said.
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