Mild recollections and surprises from long ago.

 I read Althouse's post, "Near the beginning of 'Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President'... President Carter offers a revelation involving one of his children, country singer Willie Nelson and what Nelson once described as 'a big fat Austin torpedo.'" 

"Asked about Nelson’s account of smoking marijuana on the roof of the White House at the tail end of Carter’s term in 1980, the former president lets out a chuckle. Nelson, Carter explains in the film, 'says that his companion that shared the pot with him was one of the servants at the White House. That is not exactly true. It actually was one of my sons.'

Sort of a charming vignette of a different time.  But my first reaction was, "sons"?  I remember Amy Carter, but sons?  And then it came back.  Yes, she was the fourth, the caboose.  I had forgotten about the older sons.  To refresh my memory, to Wikipedia.

I came across this nugget of family tragedy.

Carter had three younger siblings, all of whom died of pancreatic cancer: sisters Gloria Spann (1926–1990) and Ruth Stapleton (1929–1983), and brother Billy Carter (1937–1988).

Three siblings to the same cancer?  Remarkable.  Especially considering his own miraculous track of cancers and recovery.

And there is another vignette of which I don't think I was aware.  Carter can be both one of the most admirable of men and profoundly aggravating, sometimes in almost equal measures.  But this is one of those astonishingly admirable instances.

Mary Prince (an African American woman wrongly convicted of murder, and later pardoned) was their daughter Amy's nanny for most of the period from 1971 until Jimmy Carter's presidency ended.  Carter had asked to be designated as her parole officer, thus helping to enable her to work in the White House.