In January 1981, no one wanted to get away from it all more than former President Jimmy Carter. He’d just lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, and on Jan. 28 of that year, just eight days after Iranian hostages were released and Carter humbly retreated to private life — the Carter family arrived in the U.S. Virgin Islands for a vacation.
“Carter told reporters on his arrival at the St. Thomas airport from Georgia that, ‘I won’t have much to talk about,’” reported the Associated Press.
The former president died Dec. 29 at the age of 100.
But in 1981, Carter just wanted to go fishing, and Steve Winters — who retired to Cowley, Wyoming, in 2011 — was there to guide his trip.
Winters was the head of maintenance for Virgin Islands National Park. A Navy veteran who grew up in Gardiner and Jardine, Montana, Winters said he voted twice for Carter. Now the former president was looking to hide out from the press and forget about politics.
“The superintendent came to me one day and said that President Carter would like to go fishing and do native fishing,” Winters told Cowboy State Daily on Friday. “I had kind of turned native myself, and so I did a lot of the native fishing.”
Winters, who worked in the Virgin Islands from 1979 to 1983, said no one else wanted to step up and play fishing guide.
“I said, ‘Well, I can probably borrow a boat, and I’ll take him fishing,’” he told Cowboy State Daily on Friday.
The boat was a small, semi-flat bottom vessel, only 14 or 16 feet long, said Winters.
“It needed a lot of work. But anyway, it floated. That was the main thing, and the motor ran for the most part,” said Winters, remembering Carter’s initial reaction to the rickety craft.
“He looked down at the boat and he kind of grinned a little bit,” he said, noting the skepticism of the Secret Service agent who questioned whether they were really going out in such a small vessel. “The Secret Service, they had to be there, and there had to be a Secret Service person on the boat.
“And so there was a young agent. He kind of looked down and he says, ‘Are we really going in that boat?’ And I said, ‘Yep, that’s the one we always fish in.’”
Off they went.
Carter, Winters, the superintendent of the park and a squeamish Secret Service agent.
“I had a net, and we caught some fry and kind of did the native fishing thing,” said Winters, detailing how he chummed the waters, then used baited hooks on hand lines to go after fish attracted to the chum.
As the little boat bobbed up and down in the swells, Carter and Winters did not get any bites.
Then Winters noticed something.
“The young Secret Service man was getting pretty sick in the boat,” he said. “He was definitely not a maritime individual, believe me. All of a sudden, I see him lean over the boat and he did his own chumming.”
There on the water, Carter kept the conversation on fishing and anything but politics.
“He was strictly there for vacation, whether you want to call it R&R, the only thing that had any resemblance to politics was the Secret Service,” said Winters. “After a while, President Carter decided that he wanted to go take his rod and fly fish for bonefish along the mangroves.”
Again, Carter was skunked, and the boat returned to shore with no fish.
Not A Politician
That night, Merna Winters and the superintendent’s wife, who was originally from New Mexico, made dinner for the Carters.
Merna was no stranger to hospitality, growing up outside Pinedale, Wyoming, where her parents ran Woolard’s Service, a store and gas station, at Warren Bridge. Merna and Steve met in 1969 while Merna worked in Yellowstone National Park, and they socialized with other couples in the Park Service.
At the superintendent’s home in the Virgin Islands, Merna helped host “a tamale feed with Rosalind and President Carter,” Steve said.
A lot was on the former president’s mind at the time. As Carter would later reveal in his books and future interviews, the 39th president left office deeply in debt because his family farm supply business he’d turned over to a blind trust while serving as president fell on hard times.
NPR’s “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross interviewed Carter several times, and when he reflected on the immediate aftermath of his loss to Reagan, Carter told Gross, "I wanted to write a presidential memoir called 'Keeping Faith,' which I did, because I was deeply in debt. And the proceeds from selling off all my business and from the writing of that first book let me pay off my debts."
Perhaps two weeks of island life helped Carter collect his thoughts for future writing.
For Winters, Carter left this impression: “In my opinion, he was really not a politician, and he was not good at that. But humanitarian-wise, he probably was the best of any of them.”
Across The Street, Across The Aisle
The Winters’ neighbor in Cowley, Richard Patton, is such a staunch Reagan supporter, he set up his own reagan.com email address.
Still, it was Patton who reached out to Cowboy State Daily and pitched the idea of telling Steve and Merna’s story about the time they hosted President Carter on vacation.
“We were talking about having tamales for the holidays or something like that. She said she made some for the Carter family,” said Patton. “And then we found out that Carter had passed away. So it was just very interesting that we have been talking about him and then suddenly we learned that he passed.”
Patton’s fascination with U.S. presidents goes back to when Reagan visited Billings, Montana, in the early 1980s.
“I went outside the Metra Arena where he had spoken and was waiting for him and his motorcade to come by,” he said. “And when he did, I was waving at him and he waved back at me. So I've always thought a lot of him, especially after that.”
As for why Patton wanted to see Winter’s story about fishing with Carter shared with a wide audience, he said hearing about his neighbor’s connection to the former president brought back memories from the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“I remember hostages in Iran and the economy as young person, that was a difficult time. I'm glad things turned out election-wise the way they did,” said Patton. “But I don't want to make this a political story or anything like that because this is just about remembering who he was as a man, not just how things went politically for him.”
As Patton explained his fascination with his neighbors’ encounter with Carter, he said sometimes it’s easy for Wyomingites to “forget that we're relevant to things that go on in the world.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
