Blitz Bureau
ATLANTA: Former president Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday is on 1 October. His supporters didn’t want to wait that long to throw a party.
A parade of Georgia luminaries on Tuesday lit up the venerable Fox Theater on Peachtree Street. In a city that boasts new, swanky modern glass and steel venues like the Cobb Energy performing arts centre or the Eastern befitting the city’s rising prominence, organisers chose Atlanta’s oldest concert hall to celebrate Carter’s centennial. Jimmy Carter is four years older than the Fox Theater.
“Not everyone gets 100 years,” said Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson and 2014 nominee for governor of Georgia. “But when someone does and uses that time to good, it’s worth celebrating.”
Video testimonials by Jon Stewart, Bob Dylan and others, were splashed across a screen, interspersed by images of famous musicians of the period visiting the White House.
Every living president except Trump sent a message of congratulations and well-wishing. Carter, a Democrat, was president of the US from 1977 to 1981, and is the longestlived US president.
He was awarded the 2002 Nobel peace prize for what the committee said was “his decades of untiring effort to find solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.
