Amy Carter

Some Lesser Known Facts About Amy Carter

• Amy Carter’s family voted a year before her birth to decide if her parents should have a daughter. They even picked her name from a Webster’s Dictionary before she was born.

• Amy spent her childhood in Plains, Georgia, until 1970, when her father was elected as the Governor of Georgia. Following his election, the family relocated to the Georgia Governor’s mansion in Atlanta.

• In 1976, Amy’s father became the President of the United States, and the family moved to the White House, where they lived for four years.

  

• During her time in the White House, she received a lot of media attention as she was the first young child to live there since John F. Kennedy’s presidency in the 1960s.

• Amy had a Siamese cat named Misty Malarky Ying Yang when she was in the White House; it was the last cat to live there until Bill Clinton’s cat, Socks. Amy was also gifted an elephant from Sri Lanka, which was later sent to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

  

• Amy loved roller-skating through the East Room of the White House and had a treehouse set up on the South lawn. Whenever she held slumber parties in the treehouse, Secret Service agents kept watch from the ground.

  

• From 1971 until the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Amy’s nanny was Mary Prince, an African American woman who joined through a Georgia prison release program and was later cleared of a wrongful murder conviction.

  

• On 21 February 1977, a White House state dinner was held for Canada’s Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. During the event, Amy, who was nine years old, was spotted reading ‘Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator’ and ‘The Story of the Gettysburg Address’ while her father and Trudeau exchanged formal toasts.

• After his presidency, Carter relocated to Atlanta, where she attended Woodward Academy.

• Amy was kept informed about important issues. In a 1980 debate with Ronald Reagan, President Carter shared that when he asked Amy what the most important issue in the election was, she said, “the control of nuclear arms.”

• While in high school, Amy served as a Senate page during the summer of 1982. She later attended Brown University, where she became active in protesting apartheid, a system of racial segregation in South Africa, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

  

• In 1982, Amy appeared on the chat show ‘Late Night with David Letterman,’ which aired on NBC.

• In 1987, Amy was dismissed from Brown University as she struggled to keep up with her coursework.

•  In 1995, she illustrated her father’s children’s book, ‘The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.’

  

• Amy Carter serves on the board of counsellors for the Carter Center, an organisation founded by her father to promote human rights and diplomacy.