Imagine more news than you can use coming over wire services announcing that Jimmy Carter had died at age 100 on Dec. 29, 2024. More than likely, you received the news on an electronic device in our world that has experienced vast changes in communication during the last century.
Or perhaps you were unfamiliar with the former naval officer and Georgia governor, a peanut farmer with a big heart and broad smile who served from 1977 to 1981 as the 39th President of the United States. When Carter took the oath of office he was 52. And what distinguishes Carter nearly half a century later is his humanitarianism, all efforts he initiated after he’d served as president for four years.
News of Carter’s death took me back to images of the not-always-popular president wearing a cardigan sweater when he’d urged folks to conserve energy by keeping thermostats turned down in the late 1970s. Newspaper stories featured long lines of cars waiting to fill up at gas stations on alternate days, highlighting that Carter’s trying to tackle the energy issue had been a costly mistake. Carter called the energy crisis “the moral equivalent of war.” Energy, however, was not a top priority for the electorate. Jobs and inflation were.
Yet as President on the international scene, he brought the heads of Israel and Egypt together to sign a historic peace treaty in 1979.
Carter lost re-election. Yet Carter, at the young age of age 56 at the end of his presidency, went on to serve for all humanity and became known as a worldly peacemaker.
The recent news also took me back to the summer of 1976 when America was celebrating its bicentennial Independence Day anniversary with Tall Ships in New York Harbor just before the Democratic National Convention was hosted at Madison Square Garden from July 12-15 in NYC.
Little-known Carter had gained popularity among primary voters as a leader without ties to Washington, D.C., during a time when public confidence had been shaken by the Watergate scandal and unemployment was approaching 10 percent nationwide.
Though this story is intended to remember President Carter, allow me to back up about 18 months to December 1974 when Abe Beame served as Mayor of New York, presiding over the city during its fiscal crisis and near bankruptcy.
After college graduation in 1969, I went to live in NYC after landing a job in the creative department at a Madison Avenue ad agency where I was a self-appointed party planner, baking cakes to celebrate my co-workers’ birthdays. They encouraged me to start my own cake business.
Even though the economy had tanked, I took a chance to open a specialty-order business called Creative Cakes on East 74th Street. Naysayers wondered who’d pay for specialty-order cakes when many New Yorkers couldn’t afford to put food on the table.
Always a news junkie, those early days of my cake shop found the radio dial tuned to WOR news talk radio 710 while I worked. The New York press corps at first was not so favorable toward Mayor Beame nor his Democratic supporters when the City was almost forced into bankruptcy.
Recent reminders that centenarian Carter’s rise to the nomination at age 52 brought back memories of the summer of 1976. That year, my tiny cake shop received big orders for one-of-a-kind chocolate cakes decorated to order with butter cream frosting for parties to celebrate Democratic governors and Carter’s road to the White House.
In the late 1970s, husband Jim and I were married and our first of three children was born when President Carter served. The second of our three children was born in 1981 and soon after, we purchased our first house in New Jersey. In the mid-1980s, I sold my Creative Cakes business.
Since our move to Naperville 32 years ago, photo albums filled with Polaroid pictures of “Creative Cakes” have been tucked away in a cabinet in our basement.
News of Carter’s death found my flipping pages in Album #13 1976, chock full of faded photos of cakes decorated for the Dems’ parties. Hand-written captions under photos enlightened me that I’d forgotten about cakes for parties in East Hampton. The array of cakes featured a caricature of the peanut farmer with a wide smile, a donkey and the White House.
What’s more, NBC had ordered birthday cakes for its newscasters John Chancellor (July 14, 1927) and David Brinkley (July 10, 1920). And CBS had ordered Walter Cronkite’s large “Bicentennial” promotional cake shaped like a map of the U.S. to hold 200 candles. Back then, before the widespread of cable between the mid-1970s and 1980s, most folks got their TV news from ABC, CBS and NBC. No one knew of podcasters.
Life goes on. It’s 2025. And I’m reminded to ask myself, “What have you done lately?”
More than likely, some of my time in early January will be spent watching tributes to President Carter online. The state funeral for the former president will be held in Washington on Jan. 9.
The world knows the U.S. Presidency has been limited to a select group of individuals since 1789. The 47th Presidency will begin when Donald J. Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025.
That said, public service and giving to help others have no limits for any of us. And so it goes with many choices and opportunities right here in Naperville.
– Stephanie Penick
PN Publisher
