By David Fleet
dfleet@mihomepaper.com
Ortonville — As a lifelong collector of political memorabilia, Ortonville resident Ken Bush has assembled a remarkable collection of items including a George Washington inauguration pin to Abraham Lincoln Mourning cards to Dewey for President pins.
While his collection gathered over 70 years features every president along with many political hopefuls, it also includes a few personal encounters along the way.
Bush, 86, is longtime member of the American Political Items Collectors organization and recalls attending a national meeting in Atlanta in the early 1980s.
“Jimmy Carter walked up and shook my hand,” recalls Bush. “He was the President of the United States at the time, and politicians often attended the APIC events. I don’t recall a lot of security around him at that time. Another time I met Gerald Ford at an APIC meeting, you just never knew who was going to show up.”
Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, died Dec. 29, 2024 at his home in Plains, Ga., surrounded by his family. He was 100, the longest-lived president in U.S. history. A member of the Democratic Party, Carter served from 1963 to 1967 in the Georgia State Senate and from 1971 to 1975 as the 76th governor of Georgia.
President Carter is survived by his children — Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy; 11 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Rosalynn, and one grandchild.
“Jimmy Carter’s campaign items had some unique pieces such as little bags of unshelled peanuts,” said Bush. “However his items were not as popular as FDR or Teddy Roosevelt.”
Like his memorabilia, Carter’s popularity while in the White House waned. Several factors contributed to the demise of his presidency including on Nov. 4, 1979 when Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy and detained more than 50 Americans for 444 days.
Oakland County Historian and Ortonville resident Carol Egbo said Jimmy Carter is unlikely to ever make any historian’s top ten list of American Presidents.
“His accomplishments while in office won’t fill the pages of history books,” said Egbo. “His legacy instead will center on what he accomplished as an ex-President. He’ll be honored for The Carter Center which he founded with his wife Rosyln in 1982 and its simple but powerful mission: Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope. He’ll be respected as a recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, awarded ‘for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions and to advance democracy and human rights.’  And perhaps he’ll best be remembered with a hammer in his hand helping build a Habitat for Humanity home. Quite a set of accomplishments for a peanut farmer who grew up in rural Georgia.”
Local author and Brandon Township resident Bill Haney recalls Carter’s agricultural roots.
“My closest connections to Carter were that I lived in Marietta, Georgia in 1959, working at Lockheed Aircraft, while he was farming peanuts down the road in Plains, to which he had returned after his naval career ended,” said Haney.
“Years later, in 1981, I worked at Bendix Corporate in Southfield, as director of corporate communications, reporting to Alonzo ‘Al’ Macdonald, who was close to Carter, having just served as his chief of White House staff during the Carter presidency,” he said.
“Carter’s presidency and his decades of service to the nation and many meaningful causes afterwards demonstrated what a good and decent person he was, a true citizen and public servant,” added Haney.