KIRO Newsradio colleagues remember Pres. Jimmy Carter fondly

It’s hard to find anyone to say anything negative about Jimmy Carter as a man and members of the KIRO Newsradio team are no exception. KIRO Newsradio host John Curley, MyNorthwest content editor Bill Kaczaraba and two retired radio legends — Dave Ross and Gregg Hersholt — all reflect on meeting Carter and the discussions they had with him, while historian Feliks Banel shared his experiences reporting on the impact the president had during the Mt. Saint Helens crisis in the region.

A book of poetry leads Jimmy Carter to a John Curley interview

It was the Carter administration that decided commercial airlines should be deregulated. It was 1978 and, all of a sudden, “all these commercial airlines started to compete against one another … and the prices started coming down,” Curley said on his show on KIRO. “Everybody was happy.”

Curley said Carter did big things to deregulate different industries.

“People always think, he ruined everything,” he said. “He was a horrible president, but God bless him. At 100 years old, I had a chance to interview him.”

Curley said Carter had just put out a book of poetry and his reps were shopping him around to talk about it. They said, “‘Hey, Carter is going to come on your show.'” John explained that when you get a chance to interview a president, you don’t turn it down. “Who cares what he wants to read. Let’s do it.

“So he comes in, nice guy, really sweet individual,” Curley continued. “He sits down in the chair. They put the mic on him and everything, and he’s got his book. ‘Did you get a chance to read some of my poems?’ he asks. ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I’m going to read some of them.'”

Carter then showed Curley the poems he wanted to read.

“So he starts reading the poem,” he shared. “He’s sitting there live on television, and all of a sudden, in my ear, I hear the director say, ‘Go ask a long question, and we’ll keep the camera on you. The president’s microphone is dying.'”

Curley explained this big interview was turning into Carter’s handlers trying to camouflage a mic exchange so the audience didn’t see it.

“The camera turns to me, and I’m constructing this really long, ridiculous question,” he shared. “There’s the studio audience. They’re there watching Carter, sort of nodding through this really long rambling question. He’s listening and listening. I’m comparing him to Ulysses, or Walt Whitman, or something. The production guy comes running to the stage, and the Secret Service tackles him. And they take this poor guy and they slam him onto the ground. And they grab him by the one arm and a leg, the microphone falls out of his hand and scrape him across the floor, off he goes out into some exit somewhere, and there’s not a sound. The audience is stunned. So I finished the question, and his microphone is still not working at this point, so it’s kind of cracking up a little bit, and we ended up going to a commercial break, and then we had to apologize to the audience for how upsetting it was to see.”

Listen to the full version of the story.

Dave Ross returns to talk Jimmy Carter

“Carter was a complicated man in a complicated time in our nation’s history, and I’d like to get a little perspective,” “Seattle’s Morning News” host Charlie Harger said. “So let’s talk to someone who covered Carter in the 70s and 80s.”

Enter Dave Ross, the former host of “Seattle’s Morning News” and a recently retired radio legend with nearly five decades of broadcast experience. Ross reflected on meeting Carter during his first full-time job in the industry, before Carter became president.

“The thing that impressed me about him was that he was utterly unpretentious,” Ross said. “I remember he was trying to make this very controversial decision about whether to build a dam in rural Georgia, dam up this beautiful scenic area. I walked into his office, and he was sitting at his desk. There was nobody, no gatekeeper in the room outside the office, and I needed the story, so I walked in and there he was.

“He said, ‘I’ll talk to you in a minute.’ And so I sat there as he was writing out this statement on a yellow legal pad, the statement in which he issued his decision that no, we were not going to build the dam because it was too spectacular an area, and that’s the kind of man he was,” Ross continued. “He certainly had a strict moral code. He had a work ethic. He was trained as an engineer in the Navy, so he actually went out in person to the site of this dam and visited before he made his decision. That was the kind of man he was. I didn’t think he had a chance at all of becoming president because he was such a low-key politician.”

Ross mentioned while his presidential term was thorny, the work he accomplished after his presidency truly revealed what kind of person he was.

“When the economy is bad, the president is not appreciated. Clearly, he felt that his job was unfinished, that he had more to do and I think that’s what motivated him to stay so active. His post-presidency was, in a way, to redeem himself, but also because he cares so much about people,” Ross said. “He had a very strong moral character and a strong Christian faith, and he had held the highest position in the country to do whatever he could do to help. So, I think a lot of what he did after his presidency was motivated by a need to try and make good on what he thought was a half-finished job.”

Carter: ‘People may kill their enemy, but they won’t kill their enemy once they meet their children’

MyNorthwest Content Editor Bill Kaczaraba met the president several times both as a local reporter and a network producer.

“I met Carter for the first time in Plains, Georgia, a rural town 170 miles outside of Atlanta,” Kaczaraba wrote for MyNorthwest. “I was a local reporter for a TV station in Columbus, Georgia.”

On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan, then president of the U.S., was shot while returning to his limousine after giving a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel. For what seemed like an eternity, it was not known whether the president had been shot.

“My news director wanted me to go to Plains to get comments from Carter either way,” he shared. “It was classic TV news: You are sent to interview a person without knowing what they are going to be willing to talk about or what they are going to say if they do.”

Kaczaraba ended up sitting in the president’s mom’s house all day watching coverage of the shooting.

“I was only 22 years old and was nervous to meet a president,” he said. “What I remember was how gentle and warm he was. Looking back, I also recall the lack of security around him.”

Almost a decade later, Kaczaraba met Carter again.

“By then, I was a producer for CNN in Atlanta and was working on a documentary for the network,” he said. “I was supposed to interview Carter at his library just a mile from CNN. The staff at the Carter Center took pride in the fact that they were a ‘working’ facility. They were focused on bringing national representatives from countries engaged in or about to be engaged in civil war. At times, as many as four nations would be negotiating.”

Carter was the chief negotiator, trying to replicate his success in the Middle East with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Kaczaraba and his crew arrived at the Carter Center two hours early to make sure we were all set when the president came to meet us.

“To my surprise, Carter came out 90 minutes early,” he shared. “I apologized for the fact that we weren’t ready. He told me that was OK because the group he was negotiating with was unwilling to budge, and he told them he had an interview with us just so he could get out of the room. He told me to ‘pretend’ we were having an important conversation so he could give them, and himself, a breather.”

Kaczaraba said he was surprised at how casual he was. Carter was dressed in jeans and a denim shirt.

“He showed the same warmth and charisma he had when I first met him,” Kaczaraba said. “He introduced himself to every member of the crew, which I believe he did because he was so nice, not because he was taking into account that everyone wanted to shake hands with a president.”

Kaczaraba asked him how he was able to get the Mideast Peace Accords signed. Carter was very clear that it was because the two groups spent a few days at Camp David before talks began. He wanted the groups to get to know each other and their families on a personal level.

“You might kill your enemy,” he told Bill. “But you’re not going to kill people when you know their children.” That was something Kaczaraba would remember for a lifetime.

Carter visits Washington in 1980 amid the destruction

After Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared all of Washington a federal disaster area and came to see the devastation for himself.

“Air Force One landed at the Air National Guard Base at Portland International Airport on the evening of Wednesday, May 21, 1980. The entourage traveled by motorcade to a briefing at the Gifford Pinchot National Forest headquarters in Vancouver, Washington, and then to the Marriott Hotel in Portland, Oregon, for the night,” Resident Historian Feliks Banel wrote.

“The next morning, Carter, Washington Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, and other officials (and the news media) took off from the air base in a fleet of seven helicopters,” he said.

For the next hour or so, they viewed mud and debris from the eruption clogging the Columbia River (near the mouth of the Cowlitz, which was also clogged) and blocking freight traffic in the busy corridor; flooding near Longview; homes in the Toutle Valley and other areas damaged by mudflows coming down the Toutle River; and the unimaginable devastation in the immediate vicinity of the volcano.

“Carter met many of the 40 or so people staying at the shelter, listened to their stories and offered words of support,” Feliks shared. “Longtime Sen. Warren Magnuson of Washington was also on the tour with Carter that day, and at one point, newspaper accounts say, he and Governor Ray tussled verbally over state versus federal funding required to aid in disaster recovery – Ray wanted federal dollars, Magnuson said the feds were broke.”

“I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this before,” Carter told the gathered members of the media. “Somebody said it looked like a moonscape. The moon looks like a golf course compared to what’s out there.

“It is a horrible-looking sight,” Carter continued. “The absolute and total devastation of a region … encompasses about 150 (square) miles. It’s the worst thing I have ever seen. It is literally indescribable, and it’s devastating. There is no way to prepare oneself for the sight that we beheld this morning,” the president continued. “I don’t know that … in recorded history in our nation, there has ever been a more formidable explosion.”

Radio host Gregg Hersholt reflects on meeting Carter before and after his presidency

Gregg Hersholt, a veteran morning radio news anchor in the Pacific Northwest, mentioned on “Seattle’s Morning News” with host Charlie Harger that his first professional run-in with President Jimmy Carter came when he was just the governor of Georgia.

“I first met him in 1974. I was in Spokane. The Expo ’74 World’s Fair was underway, and he was two years into his term as governor of Georgia, Hersholt said. “He came to Spokane. I was emceeing little events at the outdoor amphitheater there that summer to make a little extra money. It was Georgia Day and Governor Jimmy Carter came to town. I didn’t know who he was, but I had to introduce him before this crowd.

“He came up to me, very unassuming guy, wearing a cardigan sweater and put his hand out and said, ‘Hello, I’m Jimmy Carter, governor of Georgia. What’s your name?’ We stood there for probably five or 10 minutes talking, mostly just him asking me about my life,” Hersholt continued. “I would never have guessed that two years later he would become President of the United States.”

Hersholt mentioned that of all the political leaders he’s met with and introduced to crowds, Jimmy Carter was the only one who came with no entourage.

40 years later, long after his presidency, Carter returned to Washington to promote a book he just wrote, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, and joined Hersholt live in-studio during his early morning radio show.

“Jimmy Carter is sitting here in the room with me, and he’s sitting there almost in a state of Zen with his eyes kind of closed, rocking back and forth, listening to the broadcast,” Hersholt said. “To this day, I just regret not breaking out of the rigid format and bringing him to the microphone. But, you know, he sat there so contentedly that it was a kind of a silent statement about what kind of a guy he was. He didn’t want to interfere with the program. He just waited for his turn.”

Listen to John Curley on “The John Curley Show“ weekday afternoons from 3-7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X and email him here. 

You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on “Seattle’s Morning News” with Charlie Harger. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks.

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