Happy 100th Birthday, Jimmy Carter!

October 1, 1924, 100 years ago: James Earl Carter Jr. is born in Plains, Georgia. He left his family's peanut farm to enter the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1946, he graduated, and married a Plains neighbor, Rosalynn Smith. They went on to have 3 sons and a daughter. In 1953, while he was serving in the Korean War, his father died, and he left the Navy to run the farm.

In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate. He lost, due to some good ol'-fashioned Southern political chicanery. A recount was ordered by a court, and he won. In 1966, he ran for Governor against segregationist Lester Maddox, and lost. In 1970 he ran again, and won.

At the time, the Governor of Georgia was not allowed to serve consecutive terms, so he didn't run for re-election in 1974. What he did do that year was give the State's best-known athlete, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves, a special license plate for hitting his 715th career home run, becoming baseball's all-time leader.

Governor Carter, Henry Louis Aaron,

and Aaron's wife, Billye

In 1975, he told his mother, known to all who knew her as "Miz Lillian," "Mama, I'm running for President." Given his background -- only 4 years as Governor, and 4 years as a State Senator, a military background but not one well-known to the public, and the fact that no non-incumbent Southerner had won a Presidential election since 1848 -- her reaction was understandable: "President of what?"

He published a campaign biography, titled Why Not the Best? It attempted to explain why he was the best choice. He told audiences at his appearances, "I will never lie to you." This struck a chord with people who had lived through the last 3 Presidents: Lyndon Johnson had lied about how the Vietnam War was going, Richard Nixon had lied about pretty much everything, and Gerald Ford had pardoned Nixon, so he lied (or, at the least, miscalculated) when he said, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."

Carter won the Iowa Caucuses, making them matter for the first time. He outmaneuvered much more experienced Democrats to win the Party's nomination, taking Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. He had 3 debates against Ford, and handled himself very well in them. Incredibly, the 1st debate with Ford was the 1st time this former Governor of a decent-sized State had ever met a President.

Despite a strong comeback from Ford, Carter won a close election on November 2, 1976, and became the 39th President of the United States. He won a bare majority of the popular vote, 50.1 percent, to Ford's 48.0 percent. He won 23 States, with 297 Electoral Votes, to Ford's 240. He swept the South, except for Virginia, including winning 3 States that have not voted for a Democratic nominee since: Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. Former Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who had previously run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, ran an independent campaign, and got 0.9 percent.

Carter was sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger at the Capitol on January 20, 1977. He began an Inaugural Address tradition of Presidents thanking their predecessors for their service. Despite a tough campaign, he and Ford built a friendship that lasted until Ford's death in 2006. The new President and First Lady walked up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, so the crowds could see them -- and so they could save gas on the Presidential limousine.

Carter created more jobs per year than any President between LBJ and Joe Biden. He made strides in moving America toward energy independence, although that would last, due to the actions of his successor. He appointed a more diverse Cabinet and a more diverse federal judge corps than any President before him, although he never got a chance to replace a Supreme Court Justice, making him the only President since Andrew Johnson in 1865-69 who was denied this chance. (Even James Garfield, who was only President for 6 months in 1881, got to appoint one.)

Most of all, he made the Camp David Accords happen. Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had already made overtures of peace to each other, following wars against each other in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, all won by Israel. Carter took them to Camp David, the Presidential retreat northwest of D.C., so they could hammer out their differences. At one point, Begin and Sadat weren't speaking to each other, so Carter acted as a go-between. Finally, it was straightened out, and there was a signing ceremony on the White House lawn.

That peace holds to this day. Begin and Sadat each got the Nobel Peace Prize at that time. Carter did not.

Left to right: Sadat, Carter, Begin.

The flags are arranged differently,

because, when paired with others,

the U.S. flag is always placed to the furthest left.

But Carter did not work well with Congress, even though the Democratic Party held majorities in both houses. In his memoir, Carter admitted, "I treated them like they were the Georgia legislature, and they treated me like the Governor of Georgia."

He had special difficulty in getting along with the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts. In his memoir, O'Neill said, "When it came to understanding the issues of the day, Jimmy Carter was the smartest public official I've ever known... He was always willing to listen and to learn.

"With one exception. When it came to the politics of Washington, D.C., he never really understood how the system worked. And although this was out of character for Jimmy Carter, he didn't want to learn about it, either."

And so there would be no big initiatives, no big overall program, like Franklin Roosevelt with his New Deal, Harry Truman with his Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy with his New Frontier, or LBJ with his Great Society. Carter didn't even give his Administration a theme like that.

The economy did well for his 1st 2 years, then slowed in his 3rd year. By mid-1979, all the promise of 1976 seemed to have faded away. It wasn't that he had failed, but it felt like nothing was happening. On July 15, he gave a speech from the Oval Office, where he spoke of "a crisis of confidence":

It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

Apparently, it was Hendrik Hertzberg, Carter's chief speechwriter, who wrote the "Crisis of Confidence Speech," in an interview the next day, who used the word "malaise" to describe what Carter was talking about. So it entered the American lexicon as the "Malaise Speech," and Carter's critics have saddled him with the term "malaise" ever since.

Yes, there was a malaise. But Carter sure as hell didn't cause it. It was brought about by a cumulative effect of things that happened under Presidents of both parties, including, to a degree, Carter himself: The assassination of JFK in 1963, LBJ's seeming abandonment of his Great Society principles to spend on the Vietnam War, the race riots of 1964 to 1969, the riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Nixon's actions in Vietnam and Watergate, Ford's pardon of Nixon, Ford's inability to reduce unemployment and inflation, and Carter's own inability to handle a 2nd round of inflation -- in each case, caused largely by Middle Eastern nations raising the price of oil.

Carter's biggest "failures" were that he was not the President of Saudi Arabia, and thus had no control over the price of oil; and that he was not the President of Iran, and had no control over that nation. It underwent an Islamic Revolution early in 1979, overthrowing the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, an ally of the U.S., but running a repressive regime at home. He had not only lost his country, he was losing his life to cancer.

Two men usually identified as Republicans demanded that Carter let the Shah into America for medical treatment: Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford; and David Rockefeller, head of Chase Manhattan Bank, brother of the late former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and controller of the country's largest family fortune. Closer advisors, such as White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and Press Secretary Jody Powell, told Carter it would be a huge mistake.

He let the Shah in. Not only did it not work (the Shah was dead in a few months, anyway), but revolutionaries, with the implicit permission of the country's dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, invaded the U.S. Embassy in the capital of Tehran, and took 80 hostages. That number would drop to 52 with some releases. This was soon followed by the Soviet Union, afraid of another revolution in a nation that bordered both them and Iran, invading Afghanistan.

At first, the country rallied around Carter as the nation's leader. But as time went on, and he couldn't get the hostages out, he was seen as weak. His response to the Soviet invasion was to announce that the U.S. would boycott the upcoming Olympics in Moscow. This one act did more to paint the Soviets as an "evil empire" than anything Republicans did over 40 years. But it was seen by the public an insult, not to the Soviets, but to the athletes who had trained so hard for the Olympics.

And the economy was getting worse: Unemployment, inflation and interest rates were rising. Jobs were still being created, so it wasn't officially a "recession" yet. But it felt like one.

On April 25, 1980, a failed attempt to rescue the hostages resulted in the deaths of 8 servicemen. By this point, Carter had pretty much wrapped up the Democratic nomination for re-election. So a lot of Primary voters began voting for his challenger, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, not because they believed in him, but as a protest vote against Carter. That also damaged Carter tremendously.

At the Democratic Convention, again at Madison Square Garden, Kennedy gave a fantastic speech. Two nights later, Carter's speech was not well-received. And it looked like he was chasing Kennedy around the stage, desperate to get the familiar Convention-ending image of the defeated candidates joining the nominee in an arms-raised-in-shared-victory pose. As many Republicans thought 4 years earlier, a lot of Democrats were thinking, "We've nominated the wrong guy."

For the Republicans in 1976, not happy with Ford, the right guy was Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California. He rode concerns over the economy and Carter's handling of foreign policy to a big lead. Carter started to come back, and there even seemed to be progress with the Iranian negotiations.

There was one debate, at the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, just 1 week before the election. Carter accused Reagan of wanting to cut spending on Medicare. Which he did want to do. (And did go on to do.) Reagan laughed, and lied, and said, "There you go again." And the audience applauded.

The closing statements were symbolic of each man. Carter gave a statement that read a lot better than it looked, and inspired nobody. Reagan asked what has become the defining question of every Presidential election since: "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?"

Since, for most people, the answer was, "No," Carter won only 6 States, including his native Georgia. He lost the Electoral Vote, 489-49. The popular vote wasn't close, either: Reagan got 50.7 percent, Carter 41.0, and an independent candidate, Representative John Anderson of Indiana, who had finished 3rd in the Republican Primaries and stayed in the race, got 6.6 percent, though he didn't win a single County or Congressional District. Ed Clark, the nominee of the Libertarian Party, got a shade over 1 percent of the national popular vote.

The fact that Reagan won with only a little over 50 percent against an unpopular incumbent -- as Carter had the year before -- and the fact that the men who finished 3rd and 4th in the race got nearly 8 percent of the vote between them suggested that, while this was a firing of Carter, it was not an enthusiastic embrace of Reagan and his archconservative policies. It wasn't, "Ron, you're wonderful, we have all the confidence in the world in you!" It was more like, "Okay, Ron, the last guy was lousy, let's see what you can do." As Mort Sahl, the great politically-themed comedian of the previous generation, put it, "Reagan won because he ran against Carter. Had he run unopposed, he would have lost."

Carter finally got an agreement to get the hostages home on January 20, 1981, his last day in office. But, in one final insult, the plane that would take them out of Iranian airspace was kept on the ground until after 12:00 Noon, U.S. Eastern Time, and after Reagan was sworn in, so it didn't happen while Carter was still President.

Of course, Carter proved to be better than Reagan at everything, from creating jobs to getting American hostages home from Iran without breaking any laws.

*

Conservatives, desperate to keep up the image of Ronald Reagan as a great President in the wake of the successes of liberal Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the failures of both George Bushes and Donald Trump, are determined to show that Carter was "a failed President." They endlessly described first Clinton, then Obama, and now Biden as "another Jimmy Carter." They still do to this today, even though Carter hasn't been President for 43 years.

They don't understand the irony: Carter was their kind of guy. He was a pioneer in what we now call "agribusiness." And he left the world of business to become what they like to call a "citizen legislator." Even during his own Presidential campaign, he was billed as a "Washington outsider." He created jobs and made a grand peace agreement. If a Republican had done what Carter did, today's Republicans would consider him a saint.

In 1982, Jimmy and Rosalynn established the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta, which also hosts his Presidential Library and Museum, which opened in 1986. The Center's goal is to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering, through election monitoring and medical efforts, having now done so in more than 80 countries.

In 2002, in recognition of a public lifetime of such efforts, not just the Camp David Accords, Carter was finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Given the reasons, this emphasizes that the Nobel Committee really should split the award, because many of its winners got it through humanitarian efforts, without ever taking an active role in stopping or preventing a war. Carter did both.

The Carters also began working with Habitat for Humanity International, based in Americus, Georgia, only 10 miles from their hometown of Plains. Scenes of the Carters, even into their 90s, working on building houses became more inspirational than anything Jimmy did as President. In other words, unlike Donald Trump, when Jimmy Carter built a wall, he built four of them, and a roof, and did it over and over again, and it actually helped people.

Jimmy Carter was better than Ronald Reagan at everything, including getting hostages out of Iran. The only thing he wasn't better at was telling you about it. And self-promotion wasn't in his nature. He might be the last President for whom that's true.

And he didn't just talk about being a Christian: He challenged his own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, to live up to its ideals. He did. They didn't. And so he left, and continued to teach Sunday school at his church in Plains.

Rosalynn Carter died in 2023, at the age of 96. She trailed only Bess Truman, 98, as the longest-lived First Lady. She is laid to rest in the Carter family cemetery in Plains. This made the Carters the only Presidential couple, other than the Kennedys, for whom this opportunity was not available, not to be buried at their Presidential Library since Calvin Coolidge.

The Carters had the longest Presidential marriage ever, 77 years. To put that in perspective: Only 9 of the 1st 36 Presidents lived as long as the Carters were married. Jimmy Carter is also, by far, the longest-lasting former President, having been out of office for 43 years. He was only the 6th President to reach a 90th Birthday, after John Adams, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. he was the 1st ever to reach a 95th birthday. Today, he became the 1st President ever to reach a 100th birthday.

He has already successfully dealt with cancer once, and, unusually for such patients, has been in hospice care for over a year. His grandson Jason, the family's spokesman, says that there are days when he is unconscious for an entire day, but that, when conscious, he's aware of what's going on in the world.

He says he wants to live long enough to vote one more time, for Kamala Harris, against Donald Trump. Hopefully, given his condition, his absentee ballot has already been marked, and is ready to be mailed in. He's in Georgia, one of the close States that will decide the election, and, as Trump well knows -- he's been indicted for his efforts to get them -- both Trump and Harris need all the votes there that they can get.

Incredibly, despite some achievements that make his mistakes pale in comparison, President Carter is not the most significant political figure born on this day. William Rehnquist was, serving on the Supreme Court from 1972, including as Chief Justice from 1986, until his death in 2005. He led the 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, that changed American history, life and culture, and not for the better, setting the stage for even worse decisions by the Court.

UPDATE: Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100 years, 1 month and 28 days.

March 22-31, 1979: March Magic, March Madness

Yes, I know: It's weird to see Magic Johnson in green & white,

and Larry Bird in other colors. But it happened.

March 22, 1979, 40 years ago: The upstart World Hockey Association reaches an agreement with the more established National Hockey League on a merger between the two.

Four teams from the WHA will be admitted to the NHL. They are the Edmonton Oilers, the Winnipeg Jets, the Quebec Nordiques, and the New England Whalers.

With the Hartford Civic Center currently undergoing renovations following a roof collapse the previous year, the Whalers, now playing in Springfield, Massachusetts, will rename themselves the Hartford Whalers.

In WHA Finals, for the Avco World Trophy (Avco, still in business, is a defense contractor), the Whalers beat the Jets in 1973, the Houston Aeros beat the Chicago Cougars in 1974, the Aeros beat the Nordiques in 1975, the Jets beat the Aeros in 1976, the Nords beat the Jets in 1977, and the Jets beat the Whalers in 1978. The Jets would make it 3 out of 4 in 1979, beating the Oilers.

The bankrupt, soon-to-fold Aeros had sold Gordie Howe and his sons Mark and Marty to the Whalers, and because the Detroit Red Wings still had Gordie's NHL rights, a waiver of that had to be included in the merger. Gordie played a 32nd season of major league hockey in 1979-80, his 26th in the NHL, alongside his sons. The Whalers also picked Bobby Hull up from the Jets, who were essentially named after him (his nickname was the Golden Jet), and he and Howe finished their careers together at the reopened Hartford Civic Center.

a

The Golden Jet and Mr. Hockey

The Oilers already had Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier. By the dawn of the 1980-81 season, they'd added Paul Coffey, Jari Kurri and Glenn Anderson. After another year, Grant Fuhr. They were on their way.

As a result of their 1980s sort-of dynasty, they're the only 1 of the 4 former WHA teams in their original city. In 1995, the Nordiques moved to Denver, and became the Colorado Avalanche. In 1996, the Jets moved to Phoenix, where they're currently known as the Arizona Coyotes. In 1997, the Whalers moved to Greensboro, and then in 1999 to Raleigh, where they became the Carolina Hurricanes. In 2011, the Atlanta Thrashers, a 1999 expansion team, moved to become the new Winnipeg Jets.

The Oilers were also the only former WHA team to win a Stanley Cup in their original city: The Nords won Cups as the Avs in 1996 and 2001; the Whalers as the 'Canes in 2006, beating the Oilers in the Finals; and the old Jets/Yotes are still looking for their 1st trip to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Late March 1979. As CBS college basketball analyst Seth Davis put it in the title of a book he wrote, it was When March Went Mad.

*

I was 9 years old, and in the 4th grade at Bowne-Munro Elementary School in East Brunswick, New Jersey. I was a short, scrawny nerd who loved the Yankees and hated disco music -- all of which made me a target of abuse from bigger kids who loved the Mets and disco, and hated the Yankees and smart people. In the immortal words of actor Gene Wilder, "You know: Morons."

That's me, with family cat Bart,

probably sometime in 1978 rather than in March 1979.

The defending World Champions were the Yankees, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Washington Bullets, the Montreal Canadiens, and, if you counted the North American Soccer League, the New York Cosmos. The Heavyweight Championship of the World was in flux, as Muhammad Ali had retired, but was still recognized as Champion by the WBA. Larry Holmes was recognized as Champion by the WBC.

The Yankees were playing in the old Yankee Stadium, the Mets and the Jets in Shea Stadium, the Giants and the Cosmos in Giants Stadium, the Knicks and the Rangers in Madison Square Garden, the Islanders in the Nassau Coliseum, the Nets in the Rutgers Athletic Center, and the Devils in the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, where they were still known as the Colorado Rockies. Bringing an NHL team to the Meadowlands was still just an idea.

The only major league venues in use then that are in use now were the aforementioned Madison Square Garden, the Oakland Coliseum Arena (now the Oracle Arena, and that will be abandoned after this season), Fenway Park in Boston, Wrigley Field in Chicago, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Angel Stadium in Anaheim, the Oakland Coliseum, Royals Stadium (now Kauffman Stadium) in Kansas City, the Los Angeles Coliseum (which will be left by the Rams after this coming season), Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Rich Stadium (now New Era Field) outside Buffalo, and the Superdome in New Orleans.

The defining athletes: In baseball, Reggie Jackson, Tom Seaver, Willie Stargell, Carl Yastrzemski, Johnny Bench, Rod Carew, Pete Rose, Steve Carlton, Mike Schmidt, George Brett and Nolan Ryan. In football: Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene, Walter Payton, and the soon-to-retire Roger Staubach, Larry Csonka and... O.J. Simpson. In basketball, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Julius "Dr. J" Erving and Elvin Hayes. In hockey, Guy Lafleur, Ken Dryden, Phil Esposito, Bobby Clarke, Darryl Sittler and Denis Potvin. Bobby Orr had just retired, and, as I said, Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull were about to.

In the NASL, Giorgio Chinaglia and Johan Cruijff. In the soccer world beyond America, not that any of us knew it at the time, Kenny Dalglish, Kevin Keegan, Mario Kempes and Marco Tardelli. The year before, Liverpool Football Club, at which Dalglish had recently replaced Keegan as the main attacking threat, had won England's Football League and the European Cup, while Argentina, led by Kempes, won the World Cup on home soil, in controversial fashion. Liverpool would win the League again. while Arsenal would win a thrilling FA Cup Final against Manchester United, and another English team, Nottingham Forest, would win the European Cup.

The President of the United States was Jimmy Carter. The Governor of the State of New York was Hugh Carey. The Mayor of the City of New York was Ed Koch. The Governor of New Jersey was Brendan Byrne. The Prime Minister of Canada was Pierre Trudeau, and of Britain James Callaghan -- in each case, for just a little while longer. The monarch of Britain was Queen Elizabeth II -- that hasn't changed. The Pope was John Paul II.

Major books of 1979 included Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel, Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance, Stephen King's The Dead Zone, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, William Styron's Sophie's Choice, and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. All were made into major motion pictures or TV-movies. So was Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart, Amadeus, which debuted in 1979.

George R.R. Martin got divorced from his 1st wife, and left his job as writer in residence at Clarke University and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, because he was tired of hard winters in Dubuque, Iowa -- perhaps inspiring some of his later books. J.K. Rowling was 14.

No one had yet heard of Hannibal Lecter, Celie Harris, Forrest Gump, Alex Cross, Harry Potter, Robert Langdon, Lisbeth Salander, Bella Swan or Katniss Everdeen.

New in theaters were the films The Warriors, Norma Rae, The Story of Heidi (without interrupting any football games, as the 1968 made-for-TV version did), and Milos Forman's visually arresting, but already terribly anachronistic, version of the hippie musical Hair. And, of course, the film that ended up predicting Three Mile Island within 2 weeks: The China Syndrome.

Within a few days, they would be followed by the remake of The Champ, which starred Jon Voight and introduced us to Ricky Schroeder; Woody Allen's Manhattan, which was a little iffy then, and is retroactively very creepy now; and Love at First Bite, in which the man then best known for having a great suntan, George Hamilton, played someone who could not go out in the Sun, Count Dracula. It was a comedy.

Christopher Reeve had just begun playing Superman, Lynda Carter was about to wrap up playing Wonder Woman, and Lou Ferrigno was smashing as the Hulk, but the last live-action Batman was still Adam West, and Nicholas Hammond's recent Spider-Man and Reb Brown's Captain America were absolute bombs. Tom Baker was playing The Doctor.

Moonraker was about to premiere. Despite all the jokes about it, it actually holds up better than most classic James Bond films. Roger Moore was 51, but still believable as an action hero. Making his 2nd appearance as Jaws, Richard Kiel made a fantastic villain's henchman-turned-hero. But that 2-minute laser battle in space toward the end will forever overshadow the rest of it.

In contrast, Gene Roddenberry was filming Star Trek: The Motion Picture. People would say, "We waited 10 years for this?" Just as 2001: A Space Odyssey had helped kill the original series by showing just what special effects could do for a space film, Roddenberry learned the wrong lessons from it, doing long scenes with beautiful shots but no dialogue or plot. Also, Gene ripped himself off, redoing the episode "The Changeling." As a result of these things, it became known as Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, A Spock-alypse Now, and Where Nomad Has Gone Before.

George Lucas was filming Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Only he and Mark Hamill then knew that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. Steven Spielberg was working on 1941, which turned out to be one of his few bombs -- pun not intended.

No one had yet heard of Ash Williams, John Rambo, the Terminator, the Ghostbusters, Marty McFly, Robocop, John McClane, Jay & Silent Bob, or Austin Powers.

Just wrapping up their 1st seasons were the TV shows WKRP in Cincinnati, The White Shadow, The Dukes of Hazzard, Diff'rent Strokes, Taxi, Mork & Mindy, and the original version of Battlestar Galactica. Preparing for a fall debut were Hart to Hart, Benson, Trapper John, M.D., Knots Landing and The Facts of Life.

Appearing on CBS' Match Game that week were comedian Foster Brooks, show mainstays Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly, Lorna Patterson (then starring in the short-lived CBS sitcom Working Stiffs with Jim Belushi and Michael Keaton), former Laugh-In co-host Dick Martin, and Betty White. (Richard Dawson had already quit the show, to focus on hosting Family Feud.)

And 1979 was a disaster for NBC. They launched the super-campy, body-suited version of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a lame attempt to capitalize on Star Wars and Star Trek that did no one, least of all the original character, any good. But that show was still a gem compared to their disastrous Hello Larry, Brothers and Sisters, Turnabout, and, yes, Supertrain.

NBC was desperate enough to advertise these shows on what were then "independent stations": In New York, you could turn from WNBC-Channel 4 to WNEW-Channel 5 (now WNYW, Fox 5), and see a promo for Supertrain, an obvious Love Boat ripoff. Or Brothers and Sisters, not to be confused with the later ABC drama of the same title: This was a ripoff of Animal House, which ABC had tried to officially do, taking some of the actual actors from that film and making the ill-fated Delta House.

In 1979, NBC was so bad! (How bad was it?) It was so bad that, on one of the few NBC shows that was still successful, The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson suggested that the network should use the same method that the floundering Chrysler Corporation was using, with NBC sportscaster Joe Garagiola faking a smile throughout the commercials: Pay off viewers to accept a lousy product: "Watch Hello, Larry, get a check!" It would have been no use: Hello, Larry ran 38 episodes in 2 seasons; between them, Brothers and Sisters, Turnabout and Supertrain aired 28 episodes.

No one had yet heard of Sam Malone, He-Man, Goku, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Thundercats, Bart Simpson, Fox Mulder, Xena, Ash Ketchum, Jed Bartlet, Tony Soprano, Master Chief, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Rick Grimes, Don Draper, Walter White or Richard Castle.

The Number 1 song in America -- which almost came true in a way the Gibb brothers never intended -- was "Tragedy" by The Bee Gees. Disco still ruled the radio waves, to the dismay of all people with taste. Frank Sinatra was about to record "Theme from New York, New York." Paul McCartney was recording the Wings album Back to the Egg. Bob Dylan was about to start recording his 1st Christian album, Slow Train Coming. Michael Jackson was recording his album Off the Wall.

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, sang at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. The Pretenders were signed to their 1st recording contract. Eric Clapton finally married his "Layla," Patti Boyd, formerly Mrs. George Harrison. Shortly thereafter, Black Sabbath fired lead singer Ozzy Osbourne, and replaced him with Rainbow lead singer Ronnie James Dio.

Inflation was such that what $1.00 bought then, $3.62 would buy now. A U.S. postage stamp cost 15 cents, and a New York Subway ride 50 cents. The average price of a gallon of gas was 88 cents (and that was considered way too high), a cup of coffee 83 cents, a McDonald's meal (Big Mac, fries, shake) $1.95, a movie ticket $2.42, a new car $6,848, and a new house $70,350. On March 22, 1979, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 861.31.

The tallest building in the world was the Sears Tower in Chicago. Mobile telephones were hardly known by the public, and were big and bulky, called "bricks." The leading home video game system was the Atari VCS, later rebranded as the Atari 2600.

There was no Internet as we now know it. Steve Jobs had just made his 1st $1 million at Apple. Bill Gates and his company Microsoft were still working on developing programming language software for various computer systems. Tim Berners-Lee was creating type-setting software for computer printers.

Automatic teller machines were still a relatively new thing, and many people had never seen one. There were heart transplants, liver transplants and lung transplants, and artificial kidneys, but no artificial hearts. Skylab was less than 4 months from falling out of Earth orbit, and, even if NASA thought it could be saved, it didn't have the equipment ready: The 1st fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, was only delivered to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida on March 25, 1979.

Jean Renoir, and Emmett Kelly, and Nino Rota died. Music figures Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte, and Adam Levine of Maroon 5, and Norah Jones were born. So was NCIS actress Pauley Perette. So were sports figures Kevin Youkilis, and Erik Bedard, and Nicolas Anelka.

*

Today, March 22, 2019, Jimmy Carter reached the age of 94 years, 5 months and 21 days, making him the oldest former President of the United States ever. He already held the record for longest post-Presidential life, over 38 years.

On September 17, 1978, after days of talks at Camp David, the Presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains outside Washington, President Carter, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel went to the White House, and signed the preliminary agreement for the Camp David Accords, ending the official state of war between Israel and Egypt.

It wasn't easy getting each country's government to approve it, and Carter personally traveled to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Cairo to lobby for support. But on March 26, 1979, back at the White House, the final agreement, approved by all 3 countries, was signed by Carter, Begin and Sadat.

Left to right: Sadat, Carter, Begin

Begin and Sadat had already received the previous year's Nobel Peace Prize for it. Carter would have to wait until 2002 for all his peacemaking and humanitarian efforts to be officially cited by the Nobel committee.

After 40 years, the peace still holds. Israel would make peace with Jordan in 1994. But the peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which seemed to be doing so well in 1993, fell apart in 2000, and that half-hot, half-cold war goes on.

*

March 26, 1979 was a momentous day for another reason, although hardly anybody knew it at the time. The NCAA held the Final of its Division I Basketball Tournament, at the Special Events Center at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City.

Built in 1969, the building is still used by the Utah Runnin' Utes, and has since been renamed the Jon M. Huntsman Center, in honor of the chemical magnate whose son, also named Jon Huntsman, would later serve as Governor of Utah and U.S. Ambassador to Russia.

Indiana State University, located in Terre Haute, coached by Bill Hodges, undefeated at 33-0, Champions of the Missouri Valley Conference in both its regular season and its tournament, and in its 1st-ever Final Four (a relatively new term), took on Michigan State University, of East Lansing, coached by George "Jud" Heathcote, 25-6, Co-Champions of the Big Ten Conference (which then had no tournament), and in its 2nd Final Four, the 1st coming in 1957.

A crowd of 15,410 saw it live. About 40 million saw it on NBC, making it the most-watched basketball game ever -- and probably the best thing to happen to the Peacock Network all year. The announcers Dick Enberg, Billy Packer, and Al McGuire, who had won this game 2 years earlier in his final game as head coach at Milwaukee's Marquette University.

Why such a huge audience? Because of each team's respective stars. ISU, the Sycamores, had senior forward Larry Bird. With Portland Trail Blazers star Bill Walton so frequently hurt, and John Havlicek, Dave Cowens and Rick Barry winding down their careers, white basketball fans wanted to believe in a "Great White Hope." "The Hick from French Lick" seemed to be it.

But MSU, the Spartans, had Earvin Johnson, a sophomore guard nicknamed "Magic." Like Michael Jackson, he had a million-dollar smile -- at a time when the phrase "million-dollar" still meant something. Like Julius "Dr. J" Erving of the Philadelphia 76ers, he had amazing moves and a fabulous nickname. Unlike the moody Los Angeles Lakers star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he had a winning personality, and a name that was easy to spell and pronounce.

Both men wore Number 33. When Magic was drafted by the Lakers, Kareem had 33, so Magic switched to 32. Bird was able to keep 33 with the Boston Celtics.

The game was close for a little while, with Michigan State leading 9-8. But the Spartans were able to cover Bird tightly, enabling them to go on a 9-0 run, and led 37-28 at the half. In the 2nd half, they jumped out to a 50-34 lead. 

But Bird got the Sycamores on a good run, and with 10 minutes left (college basketball uses halves but not quarters, but this would have been the end of the 3rd quarter), Indiana State had climbed to within 52-46. The game was far from over.

There was no shot clock in college basketball at the time. For the last 5 minutes, Michigan State held onto the ball as much as they could, eating the clock, stalling. At one point, Johnson tried to inbound the ball, and Bird stole it -- presaging a famous play he would make for the Celtics against the Detroit Pistons in the 1987 NBA Playoffs. But since this was not done for the Celtics in the Boston Garden, the referee applied the rule book, and called Bird for a technical foul.

That was Indiana State's last real gasp. Michigan State won, 75-64. It was Indiana State's only loss of the season. Bird scored 19 points, but only made 7 of his 21 field goal (2-point) attempts. Johnson scored 24, shooting 8 of 15. Following his 29-point performance in the Semifinal win over Bob Weinhauer's University of Pennsylvania (still the last Ivy League team to reach the Final Four), Magic was named the Tournament's Most Outstanding Player.

Many observers credit this game with "saving basketball." This was ridiculous. As I said, the NBA already had Kareem, Dr. J and Walton. It also had Elvin Hayes and Moses Malone. It was not wanting for stars.

Bird graduated, and the Celtics had traded up to acquire his draft rights, and he signed with them between the end of his eligibility and the deadline for the draft -- which would soon be banned by what became known as "The Larry Bird Rule." Johnson forewent his last 2 years of college eligibility, and made himself eligible for the 1979 NBA Draft. He was the top pick, as the Lakers had acquired the pick from the Utah Jazz.

Johnson would be key to the Lakers winning the NBA Championship in 1980 and 1982; Bird would be key to the Celtics doing so in 1981. They would face each other in 3 out of 4 NBA Finals: The Celtics won in 1984, the Lakers won in 1985 and 1987.

The Celtics also won in 1986, over the Houston Rockets; while the Lakers won in 1988 over the Detroit Pistons, and also lost Finals to the 76ers (with Erving and Malone) in 1983, the Pistons in 1989, and the Chicago Bulls (with Michael Jordan) in 1991, before the Magic Era came to a stunning end, with 3 letters none of us knew in 1979: HIV. Bird played on until 1992. Both of them, and Jordan, played on the U.S. "Dream Team" that won the Gold Medal at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

The term "March Madness" had been used in high school basketball before 1979. But it began to be applied to the NCAA Tournament as well. The NCAA now owns the trademark.

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On March 28, 1979, Britain's House of Commons held a motion of confidence in the Labour Party government of Prime Minister James Callaghan. Callaghan lost by 1 vote, forcing an election for May 3. He would lose it, as the Conservative Party returned to power, led by Britain's 1st female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. She would remain in charge until 1990, through most of the Magic-Bird Era, into the season that would see Jordan take over the NBA.

There would soon be an election in Canada as well. On May 22, the Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, would lose to the Progressive Conservative Party, led by Joe Clark. At 39, Clark was the youngest head of government in Canadian history.

But Clark didn't get a majority, needed a coalition to govern, ignored the part of the coalition that made his government possible, and it all fell apart. On February 18, 1980, Trudeau and the Liberals won it back. At 40, Clark became the youngest ex-Prime Minister in Canadian history.

But the conservative wins in Canada and Britain foreshadowed the trouble that President Carter would have. As inflation and crime rose out of control, and the Iran Hostage Crisis began and appeared insoluable, Carter faced a Democratic primary challenge from the leader of America's most admired political family, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Carter held Kennedy off, but it weakened him to the point that the only way he was going to beat the Republican nominee, former Governor Ronald Reagan of California, was to get the hostages home before the election on November 4, 1980 -- which was also the one-year anniversary of the Crisis' start. He didn't, and lost 44 out of 50 States, and the Republicans also won control of the U.S. Senate.

But none of us knew that on March 28, 1979. At the time, Carter's chances for re-election still looked decent. Reagan was not popular outside his own party, and if not for the Hostage Crisis, Carter might have won.

*

The electoral meltdowns faced by the liberal parties of America, Canada and Britain came after a different kind of meltdown.

On an island in the Susquehanna River, in Londonderry Township, outside the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg, stands the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. Its Unit 1 began operation in 1974. Its United 2 began on December 30, 1978, just 3 months before the event in question.

As I said, on March 16, the film The China Syndrome was released, starring Jack Lemmon as the runner of a nuclear power plant, Jane Fonda as a TV reporter, and Michael Douglas as her cameraman. Douglas, like the other 2 a member of a multi-generational acting family, also co-produced. (Catherine Zeta-Jones was 9 years old, and had probably not yet heard of any of these people.)

American conservatives dismissed the film as fearmongering, since they liked nuclear power. They had also not forgiven Fonda for her activities in the Vietnam War in 1972. Then again, liberals had never forgiven them for making Fonda's activities possible.

But on March 28, just 12 days after the film's release, the fear became real. At 4:37 AM Eastern Time, while most of America was asleep, in TMI's Unit 2, the cooling system malfunctioned. This resulted in the release of 2 radioactive gases: iodine-131 and krypton-85.

Krypton? Save your Superman jokes: We almost needed a real Superman, and we didn't have one.

Metropolitan Edison (Met Ed, now known as FirstEnergy) contacted the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA), which contacted Governor Richard Thornburgh upstream in Harrisburg, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) downstream in Washington.

Met Ed thought they had the situation under control. But on March 31, a hydrogen bubble was discovered in the dome of the pressure vessel. If it were to explode, the entire plant might blow up, and then it would have been off to the races.

The TV news broadcasts weren't sure what to make of it. How dangerous was it? Walter Cronkite on CBS, John Chancellor on NBC, and Frank Reynolds on ABC were not scientists. ABC News science editor Jules Bergman explained it as best he could.

Had there been an explosion, the wind currents would have carried the radioactive gases east. To the east, it was 89 miles to Center City Philadelphia, 170 miles to Midtown Manhattan, and 140 miles to East Brunswick, New Jersey, where 9-year-old yours truly lived, and was watching these reports.

There were 3 stories that really spooked me as a kid. One was the Son of Sam murder case, in New York in the Summer of 1977. But I soon realized that the Son of Sam -- eventually revealed to be mailman David Berkowitz -- wasn't targeting little boys. (Had I known about John Wayne Gacy... But he was in Chicago, far away.)

Another was the Jonestown Massacre in November 1978, in which there were children in the nearly 1,000 people who died. But that was in South America: As creepy as it was, it was far from me.

The other was Three Mile Island. This scared the living hell out of me. The TV ads for The China Syndrome didn't help. And it went from box office bust to hit very quickly.

Met Ed found that there was no oxygen in the pressure vessel, meaning the hydrogen bubble would not explode. They managed to reduce and remove the hydrogren, by venting it straight into the atmosphere.

Note also the secondary headline about the death of Emmett Kelly.

After 3 days, the crisis was over. To emphasize this, President Carter, who had worked with the Atomic Energy Commission while serving in the U.S. Navy in 1952, toured the plant. It may have been the last time that Jimmy Carter inspired confidence in anyone. 

Nearly 2 million people were exposed to higher-than-normal radiation. Subsequent studies have shown that there was no increase in cancer, and no deaths for any reason, attributable to the accident.

Nevertheless, Unit 2 was never restarted. Exelon, which now owns the plant, has said that the plant continues to lose money, and that, barring a government bailout, it will close the plant entirely in September 2019.

If so, good riddance.

As the explosion in Chernobyl, Ukraine proved on April 26, 1986, what happened at TMI could have been a lot worse. It is believed that 43 people died as a result, 3 in the initial explosion, the rest from cancer later.

On July 7, 1991, I was with members of the youth group at Aldersgate United Methodist Church, which had spent the previous week helping to build a Christian camp at a lake in Tennessee. Our trip back took us down the Pennsylvania Turnpike. As we approached the Susquehanna, I saw the cooling towers of Three Mile Island, and a chill ran through me.

I pointed the towers out to the other teenagers in the van. But it just didn't register with them. Most of them were anywhere from 14 to 18 years old -- 3 to 7 years younger than I was. One of them weren't even born yet in March 1979. None of them had any memory of it.

They only knew it as history, as something that could have been a big deal, but wasn't.

I was there -- well, not there, but within the path that the radioactive cloud could have taken. And, as much as any kid could have at the time, I knew what was going on.

It was a very big deal. May there never be another such big deal.