Fish Fry and Barbecue

Into the hardest campaigners' lives a little fun must fall, and last week two of the three presidential candidates took a private rest down home with just a few hundred intimate friends and reporters. Jimmy Carter invited more than 100 kinsmen, journalists and neighbors to a back-country fish fry at his mother's Scandinavian-modern house in the dark slash-pine woods near his peanut fields in sweltering Plains, Ga. The homey cookout was called partly to ease an ecological imbalance in the family pond. As often happens in politics and ponds, the larger fish were gobbling up the smaller fry, making the fishing hole unhealthy.

The host attacked the problem with typical verve: he and his younger brother Billy and son Chip, 26, partially drained the pond, plunged in as deep as their shoulders and netted the fat catfish, bass and bream that were swimming around. Later, Carter and other amateur cooks dredged the fish in corn meal, deep fried the catch over open coals for 15 minutes in boiling peanut oil (of course), piled it into brown paper bags to absorb the fat and then dished it up with hush puppies, coleslaw and home-grown tomatoes.

Carter's family mingled with the crowd. His eight-year-old daughter Amy, who runs a 100-a-glass lemonade stand on the side, raced around barefoot and carefree. Brother Billy, a Georgia "good ole boy" who runs the family warehouse and a local service station, bantered with the press about the words Cast Iron emblazoned on the T shirt that stretched over his developing paunch. Explained Billy: "It's my CB radio handle. Everybody calls me that because when the fellas come by my place, I'll drink whatever they're drinking --Scotch, bourbon, gin, vodka, blend, anything. So everybody says I've got a cast-iron stomach--which I have."

A little later, Republican Ronald Reagan went through a similar R.-and-R. weekend, with appropriate regional differences. At his 600-acre Rancho del Cielo, in the Santa Ynez Mountains 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, he entertained 80 reporters and staff at a Mexican fiesta. Wearing a Western shirt, blue jeans and boots, he greeted guests with Wife Nancy at his side. Donning a cowboy hat, Reagan shouted to the TV camera pointed at him, "Ready when you are, C.B.!" a joking reference to the late director Cecil B. DeMille.

After some barbecued beef and refried beans, Reagan took his guests on a tour of the modest five-room Spanish-style house to which he and Nancy escape whenever they can. Reporters passed a poster advertising an old movie (Talk About a Stranger), a U.S. Army recruiting poster, an autographed Al Capp cartoon of Li'l Abner and a tile floor the Reagans laid themselves. Wearing an assortment of cowboy hats and a state policeman's hat, Reagan posed for photos and then asked his visitors to sign a guest book. He said that the ranch provided him the chance to drain away tensions by digging postholes, building fences and riding horseback. "It kinda does something for us," he said. Then there were the small challenges. Two months ago, Reagan knocked off a rattlesnake with a well-aimed rock. This week he will abandon his hideaway for another intense hunt for a more benign species, the Republican delegate, before the climactic Republican National Convention in August.

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