How Jimmy Carter helped put Habitat for Humanity on the map
Not long after his presidential term ended, Carter was 'hammering plywood onto a floor' in Manhattan
When Jimmy Carter swung a hammer for Habitat for Humanity, it wasn't just a photo-op.
Carter, the 39th president of the United States and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, died on Sunday at the age of 100. A one-term president who lost his bid for re-election in 1980, he spent his post-White House years as a philanthropist.
He and his wife Rosalynn Carter founded The Carter Center in 1982, a non-profit organization that, among other things, brokers ceasefires in international conflicts, serves as an election monitor in fledgling democracies, and most recently, nearly eradicated the painful and often debilitating Guinea worm disease.
A woodworker in his spare time, Carter was also widely known for his work with Habitat for Humanity, a global charity that builds and repairs affordable housing. That work began in 1984, when the former president and his fellow volunteers fixed up a dilapidated six-storey apartment building in New York City's Lower East Side.
Rob DeRocker, Habitat's former executive director for New York, spoke to As It Happens guest host Peter Armstrong. Here is part of their conversation.
Rob, how would you describe your first meeting with Jimmy Carter?
I was 25 years old. I had never met anyone of that stature before, and my instructions were to meet him at the Waldorf Astoria presidential suite. It was as if someone had taken a vacuum cleaner hose and stuck it in my mouth and pulled out all the moisture, I was so nervous.
We got in the car with the Secret Service to go from the tony Upper East Side where the Waldorf Astoria was, to the Lower East Side, which at the time had the highest homicide rate in the city.
When people think of the Lower East Side today, they think of a pretty gentrified area. When you got him into that neighbourhood, just describe what he was able to see from there?
It was abandoned building after abandoned building, and empty lot after empty lot. The primary enterprise was narcotics. I lived in the neighbourhood and there were three different brands of heroin being sold on my block.
How did he react?
We get up [to the roof] and he looks one way south and sees the World Trade Center and Wall Street and all that it represented, and then looks north and sees Midtown Manhattan and all that it represents, the power and the money.
And then he looks in the backyard of the building, this rubble-strewn lot, and he sees an elderly woman cooking her breakfast over an open fire. And that was because she had no heat or gas in her building.
That moved him. He would later write about it, along the lines of, you know: Here in the richest city and the richest country on Earth, we have this.
When we got out to the street and he was getting into his car, much to the relief of the Secret Service, he turned to me and he said, "Rob, Millard Fuller is my boss." Millard Fuller was the founder of Habitat for Humanity down in Georgia. And he said, "If there's any way I can help you here, just let him know."
I didn't know what to say, and so I just kind of blurted out, "Well, you know, thanks Mr. President. Maybe you can send some volunteer carpenters from your church."
He thought about it for a day, called Millard Fuller and said that not only was he going to send some carpenters; he was going to be one of the carpenters. And that changed everything. They came about four or five months later and Habitat became instantly on the global stage.
He's become famous now as the guy swinging a hammer, like actually out there doing the work. What was it like to work with?
Humility is the word that comes to mind right away. You know, he slept on a bunk in the dormitories in the church that I was attending in Hell's Kitchen with five other guys in that dormitory. One day we took the subway to work. One day we ran down to the project.
When people said, "What should we call you?" he said, "Jimmy." And that said legions to me.
[He] also had a good sense of humour. There was one point at which a member of your fourth estate, during a presser, said, "Well, how is it like being a former vice-president?" And he said, "Well, you know, never having been a vice-president, I really can't tell you."
Then he turned away with a wry smile and he said, "This shows how fleeting fame is."
He would do the pressers because he knew what it would mean for Habitat. But he really wanted to get back into the building, and do the work.
So here you had a guy who had been carrying the nuclear football just 39 months prior to that, and now he's down on his hands and knees in a slum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, hammering plywood onto a floor.
What do you think that moment and that project came to mean for Habitat for Humanity?
It was an instant legitimizer for all of those projects around the world and around the country. And there weren't a whole lot back then.
Habitat today is a major charity, major partnership, really, where you get sitting presidents who will at least do a few ceremonial hammer swings at a project and maybe spend a day there.
But back then, it was just unheard of that a former leader of the free world would be doing this. And so the press that it brought instantly put Habitat in the global consciousness.
I wonder, just in closing, what you think your experience should tell us about Jimmy Carter's role in the world and about, you know, the legacy he leaves behind?
You get different opinions about his presidency, [but] I don't think there's any question that he's been the best ex-president, former president, the United States has ever had.
Interview produced by Kevin Robertson
