Local & State Headlines

'The whole man'

• A famous gas station reopens as a museum honoring the many facets of Billy Carter.

Susan McCord

PLAINS — The gas station headquarters of Billy Carter has been restored and opened in a tribute to the former first brother.

“Billy Carter’s the one that put me on the map,” former President Jimmy Carter said Saturday, at the grand opening of the Billy Carter Service Station Museum, to a group that included tourists, numerous Carter family members and the people of Plains.

“Finally we’re going to have a chance to present Billy’s life in such a manner that the public will see every side of him, not just what they’ve read in the newspapers, the whole man,” said Sybil Carter, Billy Carter’s wife until his death in 1988 and mother of their six children.

His brother’s headline-grabbing statements often had been the first thing “yankee” reporters would ask Jimmy Carter during presidential news conferences, Carter said: “Mr. President, how do you respond to what Billy said last night about the belly-busting contest in Canada?”

At home in Plains, the service station that Billy Carter operated through the 1970s was a place where “opinion flowed freely and gossip abounded, and the surgical barbs and putdowns were elevated to an art form,” said Billy’s oldest son, William “Buddy” Carter, a writer who has written a book about his father.

While several retired locals might be waiting for the station to open in the morning, others “shied away after dark,” Buddy Carter said.

But “everyone knew the rough men called regulars — the farmers and factory workers, bikers and poets and philosophers — would drop their hoodlum ways in a second to help anyone in need,” he said.

The station had been home “to an icon well before the 1970s,” Mill Jennings, who sold the station to Carter in 1972, the year Jennings died, Buddy Carter said.

The Jennings family, which still resides in Plains, provided a history of the station for the museum, back to its origins as a “playhouse and dancing studio” which Jennings moved to the site in 1954, he said.

His father spent much time with Jennings, who “passed on the legacy of good times shared at the station to Billy, and through the years Billy continued some of the same rituals, of shooting dice and of cooking, but most of all of swapping tall tales and enjoying time with friends, old and new,” Buddy Carter said.

Mill Simmons, chairman of the Plains committee responsible for the museum, recalled buying his first car from Billy Carter, and returning to the station frequently for oil.

“This building has never, never looked this good,” he said.

Inside, items from Billy Carter’s wardrobe — cowboy boots a shirt printed with the logo of “Billy Beer,” a brew he endorsed in the 1970s — are accompanied by hundreds of documents, from a letter he wrote Jimmy Carter as a small child, diplomas and commendations to the Newsweek, Time and Money magazine cover stories Billy Carter made in the 1970s.

Plains Better Hometown will make the station its headquarters, and archived materials and artifacts will be rotated through exhibits at the museum, Simmons said.

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