SUBMITTED BY JIM ZBICK
“Elite Leadership,” a new exhibit featuring the nation’s two oldest military academies: West Point (Army) and Annapolis (Navy) - was added to the Faith, Family and Country Heritage Museum in Branson West last month.
Central to the display is an Army uniform worn by a cadet in the West Point graduating class of 1952.
Representing the Navy is an inscribed photograph from James Earl Carter, our 39th President, who died Sunday, December 29, at the age of 100.
Also part of the display is a 1946 Navy yearbook that was recently gifted to the museum. Two notables in American history are pictured in the yearbook: Walter Schirra, the fifth American and ninth human to ride a rocket into space and the only astronaut to fly on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft in the U.S. space program; and James Earl Carter.
Carter was born into a home in rural Plains, GA, that had no electricity or running water, but the humble surroundings did not hinder his ambitions. He worked hard at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus for a year before studying mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1942, and then gaining admittance to the Naval Academy in 1943.
In 1946, Carter graduated early in the top 10 percent of his class through an accelerated war program. He was preparing to become the engineering officer for one of the first atomic powered submarines when his father died in July 1953. He resigned from the Navy and returned to Plains to manage his family's peanut farming interests.
In 1976 he became the only Annapolis graduate to attain the office of the presidency.
To increase human and social services, President Carter created the Department of Education, bolstered the Social Security system, and appointed record numbers of women, blacks and Hispanics to government jobs.
In 1984, the former President and his wife Rosalyn began volunteering with Habitat for Humanity near their home in southwest Georgia and for more than 40 years they worked toward Habitat’s vision to build a world where everyone has a decent place to live.