I was 21 when Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. Over the four years of his presidency, I started my newspaper career, got married, had two daughters, bought a house and sold it and then bought another, and lost my father.
It was the most eventful stretch of my life. What should have been a period of hope for the possibilities ahead was too often shrouded in worry and pessimism about the future.
But one good thing came out of it: Jimmy Carter made me a forever conservative.
It was the way I recovered from a bad case of the Carter malaise. That was the name assigned to the malady with which Carter infected the country. Its main symptom was the surrender to the belief that the good times were over for good.
Carter, who died last week at age 100, presided over an economy that delivered average year-over-year inflation of 9.9%. We never went to the grocery store in those days without an envelope full of coupons.