Century of Carter: celebrating a historic presidential birthday

WASHINGTON — It’s more than just a countdown. 

CenturyOfCarter.com, a website which displays a clock counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until Former President Jimmy Carter turns 100 years old, has become an online meeting point for people of all generations looking to honor Carter’s legacy.

The website's creators were still holding their breath Monday night, hoping Carter would reach the milestone on Tuesday. 

The creators of the website are Stephen Ander, a 41-year-old data analyst from Capitol Hill, and Joseph Attia, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Virginia, from Ashburn, Va. Their collaboration, while spanning generations, is united over their shared love of the former president. 

“He is an outlier example of an American,” Ander said. “He just has a level and standard of decency.” 

“I always loved [President Carter],” Attia explained. “You feel the human nature in how ran his presidency, and you could feel it through each of his policies.” 

The unlikely collaboration was born when Attia was applying for a scholarship related to his computer science major. 

“[Ander] was one of the judges,” Attia said “I shared my past experiences and past projects with him, and we just grew this friendship that you wouldn’t expect from a scholarship process.”

A few months later Ander asked Attia if he wanted to work on a countdown to Carter’s 100 birthday, the computer science sophomore said the project was a no-brainer. 

“I was like ‘Sure thing, Steve!” the college student said.

A part of the Greatest Generation, Jimmy Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and spent his early adulthood as the heir to a modest peanut farm in the small Georgia town of Plains. After a decade in public life, Carter was elected governor of Georgia in 1971. 

Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, after an election campaign that emphasized his outsider status during a time when Washington was still reeling from the impact of the Watergate scandal and former President Richard Nixon resigning from office in 1974. Nixon’s Vice President Gerald Ford had run against Carter. 

Carter’s presidency was weighed down by a series of national and global challenges that his administration struggled to resolve ahead of his re-election campaign in 1980. These included an energy crisis and oil embargo, U.S. citizens being taken hostage in Iran and the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Olympics, held in the Soviet Union. 

Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in that election, but even after his defeat, Carter put his remaining three months in office to good use, working to release the American hostages still in Iran. The hostages were eventually released by Iran on the same day Carter left office in 1981.

Carter is perhaps more well-known and well-regarded for his post-presidency, in which he advocated for peaceful solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, organized housing efforts with Habitat for Humanity and offered help monitoring elections in burgeoning democracies. 

Carter left office a few years before Ander was born and 25 years before Attia was born. Attia was even born after Carter had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. But despite his one-term in office, the former Democratic president’s legacy lives on. 

The Century of Carter website has a feature where visitors can leave a birthday note for President Carter. Attia said that within one week the website had 500 notes. The notes range from simple thank yous to longer and more personal messages to the former President, many from people also born after Carter’s presidency.

“Thank you for being such an inspiration and for helping to remind me, a trans woman, that kindness and hope need not be rare in this world,” one note on the site reads. “I hope your 100th birthday is filled with love and friendship!”

“As a born and raised ‘Georgia Boy’ almost half your age, I wanted to wish you an amazing Centenary Birthday,” another note reads. “I have appreciated your faith, logic and spirit of duty and service to your fellow human beings.” 

The website is not just a simple clock counting down to Carter’s birthday on Tuesday. Ander, a data analyst by trade, went to lengths to make sure that the countdown was precise down to the exact hour when Carter was born in 1924. 

“At the time, the time zone was actually cut into two between Eastern and Central times, and Carter was born on the Central side of that division,” Ander said, with the data analyst eventually concluding that Carter had been born at 8 a.m. Central Time on Oct. 1, 1924. The website's clock has been set accordingly. 

To back up Ander’s research, the website has a photo of Carter’s family baby book on display, from Carter’s hometown of Plains, Ga.

“In 1924, Plains was in the Central time zone,” the website reads. “The pages from a baby book maintained by his mother indicate that although the newborn Jimmy Carter was expected to be called ‘Jim’ in the future, this nickname was seldom used.” 

Ander said the idea of the website came to him earlier this year when he noticed that people were mostly focused on Carter’s deteriorating health instead of on the former president’s accomplishments. 

“In the springtime, there were lots of doom and gloom articles about Jimmy Carter,” Ander said. “I thought I’d counteract the bad news with something people could look forward to.”

Attia said he can’t even escape the popularity of CenturyOfCarter in his personal life as a computer science student at UVA.

“Some people actually mentioned the website around me, and I just layed low,” Attia said. “I don’t really go around boasting about it.” 

According to Attia, the site got so popular that the website’s software almost couldn’t handle it. 

“I don’t think Stephen knows this but the backend of the website crashed for 20 minutes once,” Attia said. “Five notes were going into it every second.”

According to Ander, there are entire online communities dedicated to discussing the significance of Carter’s 100th birthday, with some in that community worried that websites like CenturyOfCarter might not be a good idea. 

“People were like don’t jinx this,” Ander said, with many detractors comparing the site to the leadup to Betty White’s 100th birthday. The comedian and actress died in 2021, less than three weeks before turning 100, despite TV specials and a movie dedicated to celebrating that day. 

“I want him to understand what a great impact he’s had on so many people,” Ander said of Carter. 

In February 2023, Carter’s foundation announced that he was ending medical intervention for an unspecified illness and that the former president would instead receive hospice care. 

Since then, Carter has lived a private life, only briefly entering the spotlight while attending his wife, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s funeral in November 2023. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had been married for 77 years. 

Carter has by far the longest lifespan of any U.S. president, he’s also had the longest post-presidency at 33 years and counting.