Jimmy Carter and the sad saga of a 9-ton Northern California peanut

A convoy of logging trucks pulls into Denver in 1977 after carrying a giant peanut, carved from a redwood, to Washington, D.C., to protest the expansion of Redwood National Park in Northern California. Two days after Carter’s death, the front page of the Times-Standard newspaper, just below his obituary, carried the headline: “Former president outlived the Orick ‘peanut.’” At the Shoreline Fuel Mart, the longtime home of the languishing legume, an employee answered a phone call from a Times reporter this week with a sigh, saying: “Everybody keeps calling us about this.” Carter, whose extended public farewell concludes Thursday with a funeral at the Washington National Cathedral, was posthumously praised by the National Park Service for his “pivotal role in the story of Redwood National Park,” which he nearly doubled in size in 1978 despite heavy opposition from the timber industry. His efforts remind us that leadership involves not only addressing the challenges of our time but also nurturing the earth for future generations.” The creation — and Carter’s expansion — of Redwood National Park has long been a touchy subject along California’s rural, economically depressed North Coast, where the once-thriving logging industry cratered over the last half-century. They carved the protest peanut and strapped it to a logging truck alongside a sign reading: “It may be peanuts to you but it’s jobs to us.” Redwood National Park was expanded by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 despite opposition from the logging industry.