Little Brother's Loss

The Amoco station across the railroad tracks from the peanut-warehouse office is the only public place in Plains, Ga., where you can drink beer. The suds flowed furiously last Monday night, and the good ole boys were having a great ole time: Billy Carter, 39, owner of the gas station and younger brother of the President-elect of the U.S., was throwing the party he had promised, win or lose. And, for the second time in two years, Billy had come up a loser. By a 90-to-71 margin, he was defeated for the mayoralty of Plains by Incumbent A.L. (for Aaron Loren) Blanton, 49, an air-traffic controller and part-time barber.

The gashouse gang grew rowdier as one reporter after another shoved in to yell questions over the din. This was, after all, no ordinary small-town election. Oh, I don't really care, said Billy 50 different ways. His most credible explanation: "I lost because I drink beer on Sundays and because I'm a Carter."

No doubt. Billy Carter not only drinks beer on Sundays, he gives it away at the service station in circumvention of Georgia's blue laws. After 5:30 p.m. on workdays, he spends time with a few six-packs and a roomful of cronies.

There may have been another reason for Billy's defeat. Said Jimmy Carter: "The people of Plains probably think they've got enough Carters winning elections." Beyond booze and the voters' reluctance to make Plains into a family duchy, the biggest issue in the contest was the future of the tiny town (pop. 683). Celebrity has already taken its toll: up to 2,000 tourists pour in daily, overtaxing the toilets, parking illegally in hopes of getting a ticket to save as a souvenir, tearing pages out of the Baptist church's hymnals on Sundays. Claiming that Blanton's air-controller work in Albany, 40 miles away, prevented him from executing his mayoral duties fully, Billy said he ran "because I didn't want to see Plains go right straight to hell."

For reasons of his own, Billy has chosen to adopt a buffoonish public persona when the reporters come calling. That did not help him much with the townsfolk. "I joined the church when I was twelve years old," he likes to say, "and I've been back there three times since. Correction--five times."

Wife Sybil, 38, to whom Billy has been married for 21 years, disputes his un-Christian image. "What nobody knows is that if Billy wants to go to church, he'll go to Americus [ten miles away] and go to church, and nobody knows anything about it." Billy is also a family man; the beer hour never prevents him from sitting down to dinner with Sybil and their six children, who range in age from three months to 20 years. He is also a bang-up businessman, who in the past six years has raised the gross of the family peanut business from $800,000 to $4 million plus.

Well-Read. "Anyone who underestimates Billy," Jimmy Carter said last week, "is making a serious mistake." Billy lasted less than a year at Emory University. But he reads four Georgia papers each day, as well as three books a week (Faulkner is a favorite). Says Jimmy: "Billy's a much better-read person than I am."

Billy perversely told the press on Election Night that he might like to move to Australia to try again for public office. In fact he has bought 170 wooded acres near town to build his family a new house far from the gawking tourists who "drive you slap-assed crazy." Nor will he be a stranger to public service. Right after losing to Blanton. he was named to a six-year, $1,800-per-annum term as tax assessor for Sumter County. Good thing that, as he says, he has never felt jealous of Jimmy.

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