By David Allen | Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Jimmy Carter never appears to have visited the Inland Empire as president (1977-1981). But Carter, whose services were Thursday at Washington, D.C.’s National Cathedral, slipped in at least four times before and after his presidency.
And not to play golf or give lucrative speeches. He didn’t do either.
Carter flew into Ontario International Airport while campaigning in 1976 before heading to the L.A. County Fair in Pomona. In the 1980s he visited a famed woodworker in Alta Loma and gave a speech in Redlands for a relatively paltry $14,000.
Riverside? Never. Ten presidents have visited the Mission Inn, but not Carter. Which is too bad. As a woodworker, he might have admired the Taft Chair.
In fact, his only visit to Riverside County was in 1988. On a stopover between Hawaii and Georgia, he stayed overnight at the La Quinta Resort, the Desert Sun reported, where he lodged in the El Presidente suite.
(My secret theory is that Carter thought he was booking a room at the budget-priced La Quinta Inn chain.)
For digging up Carter-related local stories for me, my thanks to library staffers Patty Edwards in Ontario and Ruth McCormick in Riverside, both the doyennes of their facilities’ history rooms.
Let’s take the stops in chronological order.
On Sept. 25, 1976, when Carter was campaigning for the presidency, his plane — nicknamed Peanut One — landed at Ontario International Airport. A crowd of 1,500 turned out to see him.
People lined up six deep along a chain-link fence. Some held homemade signs. One read “Give ’em love, Jimmy,” a play on Harry Truman’s “Give ’em hell, Harry.”
According to an Ontario Daily Report story, “Carter was greeted by a Boy Scout color guard, a band and drill team from San Gorgonio High School in San Bernardino and flowers from Miss Ontario Motor Speedway and Miss Expo 81.”

Wearing a suit and tie, Carter spoke for 10 minutes, then stepped to the chest-high fence to shake hands that reached over to him. A photo shows Carter beaming and voters looking awestruck.
Jim Edwards photographed the stop for The Press-Enterprise.
“It was exciting,” Edwards, who retired in 2013 after a 42-year career, told me Tuesday. “He’d won the nomination. People were excited at the chance to greet him.”
From the airport, Carter traveled to the L.A. County Fair in Pomona, where he walked through crowds, “shook hands with hundreds” and watched square dancing, the Daily Report wrote.
The Georgian spoke to the crowd from the square dancing platform before leaving for his next stop in East L.A. All part of the campaign do-si-do.
Carter won the presidency a few weeks later. He doesn’t appear to have visited the IE during his presidency. He did have a local on his staff, though: Jim Fallows, a Redlands native who was his chief speechwriter from 1976 to 1978.
Early in his post-presidency, Carter and woodworker Sam Maloof became friends. Maloof, whose work is in the Smithsonian, made rocking chairs, tables, cradles and other pieces of furniture in his Rancho Cucamonga workshop in limited numbers.
Their relationship is worth its own column. For now, let’s just note that on Dec. 11, 1984, Carter made a personal visit while on his way to Los Angeles.
He toured Maloof’s workshop and home, which Maloof had built with custom features in wood and which is on the National Register of Historic Places.
“Well, everything’s just a work of art,” Carter, wearing a suit and tie, told Maloof, according to an account the next day in the Daily Report.
Carter then sat down with Sam and Alfreda Maloof and their children for a homecooked meal, like any guest. A photo of the scene is on display at the Maloof Foundation, the nonprofit that opens the home and gardens for tours.

“The table and chairs are all in our dining room,” Jim Rawitsch, the foundation’s executive director, told me Wednesday. “We also have the casserole dish that’s in the photo. That’s how we know that Alfreda served former President Carter a casserole.”
Rawitsch said Carter visited a second time, date unknown. The two men stayed in touch until Maloof’s death in 2009.
Carter’s last known visit to the IE came on April 15, 1989, when he spoke at the University of Redlands’ Memorial Chapel. An audience of 1,500 — the same 1,500 who saw him at ONT 13 years earlier? — listened as he talked about foreign policy and took their questions for an hour, according to an account the next morning in The Press-Enterprise.
At his press conference beforehand, one remark stands out.
After Carter said he would advise President Ronald Reagan against pardoning Iran-Contra figures Oliver North and John Poindexter, a reporter noted that former President Richard Nixon earlier that week had offered the opposite advice.
Said Carter: “President Nixon is much more of an expert on pardons than I am.”
Let’s return to Jim Fallows, the Redlander who led the Carter speechwriting team at age 27 and now is based in Washington, D.C., as a political journalist.
James Fallows’ official White House portrait from March 1977, when the Redlands native was head speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
James Fallows’ official White House portrait from March 1977, when the Redlands native was head speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
We spoke in March 2023 after it was announced that his former boss was foregoing medical intervention and going into hospice care.
“He has invented the role of ‘former president’: home builder, peace advocate, disease fighter, election monitor,” Fallows told me then.
I asked Fallows by email Wednesday for his thoughts on the scene as Carter lay in state in the Capitol rotunda, where thousands of Americans lined up to pay their respects. He sees parallels between 1977 and today.
People are braving the D.C. cold to see him, just as Carter and his wife opted to leave their limousine to walk Pennsylvania Avenue on his sub-freezing Inauguration Day.
And just as Carter “seemed to bridge cultural, regional, racial and generational divides” in 1976, so has his passing, Fallows said, in which he has been praised by high government officials of both parties, religious leaders of all stripes and ordinary Americans.
“These ceremonies were a reminder,” Fallows told me, “of the breadth of Carter’s vision of America.”