Just days after the announcement of Jimmy Carter’s death at age 100 Sunday, Bill Brumett reflected on the moment he shook hands with the once-peanut farmer from Georgia who became America’s 39th president.
A Pine Bluff councilman from 1996 to 2018, Brumett was elected state president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, or Jaycees, in May 1978 and served a year’s term.
Officers at the U.S. Jaycees office in Tulsa coordinated a trip for Brumett and other officers to visit Washington to talk with legislators and meet Carter at the White House.
“We didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him,” Brumett said in his Dollarway Road office Wednesday, recalling a picture on his computer of his handshake with Carter, which the president autographed with “Best wishes to Bill Brumett”.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“If you’ll look at that picture, there’s a Navy guy standing behind me, and he’s got his hand behind my back and pushing me,” he continued. “I can vividly remember Carter — I had my name badge on; I shook hands with him — (I said) ‘I’m Bill Brumett. I’m from Arkansas,’ and he said, ‘Arkansas? Huh. Good luck to you!'”
The Jaycees, Brumett explained, are a young men’s progressive civic organization.
It started in 1915 in St. Louis as the Young Men’s Progressive Association and then became known as the Junior Citizens, and Junior Chamber of Commerce. It is now known as JCI USA but no chapters in Arkansas are active, Brumett said. The last state Jaycees president served 1982 through 1983.
Thanks to the Navy guy, there wasn’t much else Brumett could say to extend a conversation.
“The economy was not very good at that period of time,” Brumett said. “That’s when interest rates — I think I read that’s when the prime went to 18-and-a-half (percent). I was working at Central Transformer (now Central Moloney Inc.) at the time … and I recall that utilities got in such a bind because of the cost of money that they were literally selling equipment to create cash flow to be able to keep going. So, they quit buying transformers. And Central Transformer went into a hard time at that point in time.”
Brumett, who has an electrical engineering degree, then went to work at W&A Manufacturing Inc. in Pine Bluff before going into the insurance industry after a friend asked him about an opportunity.
Brumett celebrated 45 years in the industry in 2024.
When Carter ran for president, he impressed Brumett as a rural Southern man with gubernatorial experience, a path similar to Bill Clinton’s journey from childhood in Hope and Hot Springs to the White House in 1992. Carter served as Georgia governor from 1971 to 1975.
“We had quarterly meetings of the Arkansas Jaycees at various places around the state, and we had a big meeting there (with) a lot of the Jaycees from all over the country,” Brumett said. “There was a guy there that nobody knew who he was, and it turns out it was Jimmy Carter. I asked somebody, ‘Who is that?’ and they said ‘Oh, it’s a peanut farmer from Georgia talking about running for president.’ We were all like, ‘Oh, my goodness, he’s here in Arkansas?'”
Pundits heavily criticized Carter over his foreign policies and the state of the economy during his presidency, although he was also widely celebrated for his humanitarian work, eventually winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
“To see somebody that was the president of the United States working with Habitat for Humanity, for example, and literally seeing him driving nails and helping build homes for the homeless, things like that, and then all of the diplomatic things he did after he was president — which some of the presidents didn’t necessarily like, but he used his influence to try and make things better in the world — I admire him a lot because of all of that, more than when he was president,” Brumett said.