Ten years had passed since Carter left Plains for a career in the Navy. Visits home had been rare. Father and son had grown distant. As he sat by Earl's bedside, Jimmy discovered a side of his father he'd never seen before. "Our long conversations were interrupted by a stream of visitors, black and white," Carter later wrote. "A surprising number wanted to recount how my father's personal influence and many secret acts of generosity had affected their lives."

Betty Glad: He saw that he had really built a community around himself. A lot of people liked him, and came to see him when he was sick, and when he died, came to his funeral. And what Jimmy realized, he didn't have a community for himself.

Peter Bourne, Biographer: He's actually said to me, "You know," he said, "I wondered at that time if I died, how many people would come to my funeral, or how many people would care if I died." And I think it made him, at a fairly fundamental level, examine what life is all about.

Narrator: Duty also weighed on Carter. Miss Lillian had no interest in the business, and Ruth and Gloria had married. His brother Billy, just sixteen, was "mad as hell" when told his older brother would be stepping in.

Doug Brinkley: He was a shining star in the U.S. Navy who could have gone very, very far. He dropped all that to emulate his father, to take over his father's business. I don't think there's any higher tribute a son can make to his father than to say, "Now that you're dead, Daddy, I want to stand in your shoes."

Narrator: When Jimmy told Rosalynn, she was furious. "She almost quit me," he later said.

Chip Carter: Mom was kind of disappointed to be going back to Plains. She had worked a good bit of her life to get out of there. And they were going back to take over a business that wasn't doing very well.

Doug Brinkley: Rosalynn had finally got out of the flyspeck village and had gotten to see the bright lights and big cities. Imagine being based in Hawaii, where you get a Pacific breeze and palm trees, and the smell of the Orient in the air. And now you're back in this, suffocating, mosquito-plagued humidity of Plains, Georgia. She pleaded with him not to go.

Peter Bourne: She had seen a very nice life ahead of them and then he wanted to give that all up and go back and become a peanut farmer, and she was just really angry. And she literally did not talk to him the whole way back to Plains.

Rosalynn Carter: I pouted for about year. [laughs] Not really, but I was just the total mother and wife. It was tough for a while.

Chip Carter: We loved it. Plains is a place where at 6 or 7, 8 years old, you can go off by yourself. We spent every afternoon after school in the woods playing hide and seek and building forts and fishing and hiking and that kind of thing. It was just a great way to grow up.

Narrator: Only a year after their return home, the Carters were thrust into the turmoil sweeping across the South. In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools. White Southerners, organized into White Citizens' Councils, vowed to resist.

Rosalynn Carter: Jimmy was approached by one of the prominent businessmen asking him to join the White Citizens' Council. And he told him that it only cost $5 to join, and that he would be glad to pay his dues. And I think Jimmy told him he could flush his money down the john. But anyway Jimmy refused to do that and we lost some customers.

Dan Carter: I won't say it was a profile in full courage, but it was not an act of discretion. You had to carefully think about it. And it required at the very least a kind of independence of thought, and in some respects a kind of courage to say, "No, this I won't do."

Narrator: Carter applied all his energies to peanuts. "[He] was always experimenting, Rosalynn later wrote, trying new things... dreaming up something else he wanted to do.... " As the business expanded, he turned to Rosalynn for help.

Chip Carter: Mom is not really the type to join the Stitch and Chat, and to sit around and be content with that. Part of their uniqueness is that they're partners in everything. And I think a lot of that started back then to make her a part of what was happening so that she would really have something to be proud of.

Rosalynn Carter: He asked me to come and keep the office. And I had a friend who had taught an accounting course in the vocational technical school and she gave me a set of accounting books. I began to study accounting. I began to keep the books. And it was not too long before I knew actually as much or more about the business on paper than he did.

Chip Carter: I started working there when I was nine. We worked in the warehouse during peanut season. Peanut season was a very heavy time. Sometimes worked 50 hours straight. I think that he worked hard. He tried to instill it in his children. He obeyed his father and jumped when he spoke. We did the same thing.

Narrator: "I had to admit I was enjoying life," Rosalynn later said. The Carters went fishing, played golf, took frequent vacations. Jimmy served on the Sumter County Board of Education, taught Sunday school at the Plains Baptist Church, was scoutmaster, vice president of the Lions Club. But he had "come to the point of boredom," Rosalynn remembered. And one weekday morning in 1962, "he got up and put on his Sunday pants."