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William Alton Carter, II

William Alton Carter, II

Male 1937 - 1988  (51 years)    Has more than 100 ancestors and 14 descendants in this family tree.

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  • Name William Alton Carter 
    Suffix II 
    Birth 29 Mar 1937 
    Gender Male 
    Death 26 Sep 1988  Plains, Sumter Co., Georgia, USA Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Siblings 3 Siblings 
    Person ID I74369  Geneagraphie
    Last Modified 12 Dec 2001 

    Father James Earl Carter,   b. 12 Sep 1894, Calhoun Co., Georgia, USA Find all individuals with events at this locationd. 22 Jul 1953, Plains Find all individuals with events at this location (Age 58 years) 
    Mother Lillian Gordy,   b. 15 Aug 1898, Richland, Georgia, USA Find all individuals with events at this locationd. 30 Oct 1983, Americus, Georgia, USA Find all individuals with events at this location (Age 85 years) 
    Marriage 27 Sep 1923  Sumter Co., Georgia, USA Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Family ID F30218  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

    Family Living 
    Children 
    +1. Living
     2. Living
    +3. Living
    +4. Living
    +5. Living
     6. Living
    Family ID F30221  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
    Last Modified 12 Dec 2001 

  • Notes 
    • from an unidentified newspaper, probably the AJC, at the time of his death:
      After school Billy worked at his father's peanut warehouse. While the elder Mr. Carter served a year as a state legislator, Billy was a state Capitol page.
      The death of the elder Mr. Carter in 1953 devastated Billy, who was 16. On the day his father died, Billy was gone all day, returning that night. He had driven to Albany and bought a parakeet for his mother, "so you won't be lonely now that Daddy's gone," he said.
      The sudden death of the elder Mr. Carter precluded Billy Carter's taking over the family warehouse. Jimmy Carter came home from the navy, bought a 40 percent interest and went into business as a partner with his mother.
      A high school friend, Sybil Spires, became Bily Carter's "mother, counselor and companion." He was sent to Gordon Military Academy in Barnesville but stayed only a few months, returning to re-enroll at Plains High School. An avid reader who hid novels behind his textbooks in class, he was not as bad a student as he later testified; it is a myth that Billy Carter graduated 25th in a Plains High class of 26, according to his wife.
      At a time of global unrest, Billy was a member of the National Guard. The day after his high school graduation in 1955, he drove to Albany and joined the Marines. He completed boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., and on furlough, married Miss Spires, then still in high school. Billy was wearing his dress-blue Marine uniform with a private's stripe. Their friends soaped the windows of his car and tied tin cans to the rear bumper. But the levity ended when the newlyweds drove to the Plains Cemetery and put her wedding bouquet on his father's grave.
      The marines posted him to a camp near Chicago, and his wife took a train to join him. However, Mr. Carter did not realize that Chicago had more than one station, and lacking taxi fare, he walked all night from station to station until he found her. Later, he was stationed in Okinawa and Japan, and got his discharge in 1959.
      For a year, he worked for his brother in the Plains warehouse, but quit because he 'couldn't stand to be a hired hand in a business he thought would be his," Mrs. Stapleton wrote. Billy Carter moved to Atlanta and attended Emory University for a year, dropping out and moving to Macon, where he was a construction worker and clerk in a paint store. Sybil Carter suffered two miscarriages. Billy Carter drank heavily and, for a time, belonged to an Alcoholics Anonymous group.
      In 1963, Jimmy Carter was planning to enter political life. He prevailed upon his brother to become manager of the family warehouse, and sold him one-sixth of the company. After one of the first harvests while he was manager, Billy Carter drove to a beer joint, "Joe's" to join the local farmers in a celebration. He leapt onto the top of this car and shouted, "To heck with all the troubles of the world." That "became a tradition" after harvests, Mrs. Stapleton wrote.
      In 1970, Billy Carter bought the Georgia Amoco Station in Plains for $10,000. Thereafter he worked at the peanut warehouse until about 6 p.m., then spent a couple hours at the service station, with his buddies around him. he bought the station "as a home for his fraternity of friends," Mrs. Stapleton wrote.
      Billy Carter resented the media and tourists who came to Plains in great numbers, causing what he called the "Miami-ization" of Plains. He "decided to counterattack," according to Mrs. Stapleton. When he regaled the press with outlandish stories, he was "trying to defeat the enemy by feeding it great piles of baloney."
      The wave of national publicity swept over him. On the night that Jimmy Carter won the nomination as the Democratic candidate for president, the Carter family was in a suite in New York's Americana Hotel. Jimmy Carter turned to his brother and said: "The person I feel most grateful to, the one I feel did the most to make it possible for me to wage this campaign and make this night of victory possible, who stayed home and kept everything going, is my brother, Billy."
      Billy Carter took 100 of his friends to President Carter's 1977 inauguration. The group flew on a charter Delta jet Billy Carter named the "Redneck Special." Each paid $122 to share the cost.
      During the first year of the Jimmy Carter presidency, Billy Carter moved his family to a 14-room home near Buena Vista, about 19 miles north of Plains, to get away from noise and tourists and, he said, fearing his young children might be kidnapped.
      His halcyon years of public appearances, and his fall due to Lybia and alcoholism, followed. After that Billy was in the mobile home business as a public relations man and salesman for firms in Haleyville, Ala., and Waycross, and beginning in 1985, owned his own mobile home lots in three cities.
      Although he had said he never would, he moved with his family back to Plains, to a home a few steps from that of the former president, in 1976.
      Billy Carter had a fierce temper and once smashed his fist through a gym window after the principal refused to let his high school sweet-heart, a member of the girl's basketball team, ride to an out-of-town game with Billy in his car. Years later, he fought a man who had asked Sybil Carter to dance at a New Year's Eve party; the fight resulted in "thousands of dollars" in damage. Once Billy Carter punched an Atlanta newspaper editorial page editor, Hal Gulliver, in the chest after he had misunderstood a remark Mr. Gulliver had made.
      But Billy Carter also was a compassionate manwho once found an interstate traveler stranded near Plains; the driver's car was broken down. Mr. Carter swapped cars with him and sent him on his way.
      On another occassion, Billy Carter sped to an auto wreck scene after hearing of it on his CB radio. At the scene, an injured baby needed immediate medical care. Mr. Carter was wearing a new suede jacket that his wife had given him. He wrapped the baby in the jacket and, as its blood ruined his coat, sped to the hospital. Sybil CArter never complained.
      "i learn something new abaout him every day," his wife once said. "It's exciting. It's never boring. But he can wear you absolutely to a frazzle. He has so many emotions, so many thoughts. His mind clicks so fast. It's impossible to stay up with him, much less get a step ahead. Sometimes I thank God I have no Carter blood in me, but I'm not sorry I married one."

      Additional information was from a Time Magazine article on June 5, 1978, and Atlanta Journal articles on May 2, 1979 and July 11, 1982.



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