On a rainy Saturday in 1979, Kimberly Powell was playing cards and listening to Pink Floyd with her best friend when the phone rang.
It was NPR calling. Powell, 13, had been selected to speak with Jimmy Carter on live radio. The Barnstable Middle School student sat at the family kitchen table and waited on hold.
“I was so nervous,” Powell remembered. But she was also prepared.
A few weeks before that call, Powell was among hundreds of students who had signed and mailed a petition to the White House, inviting Carter to Cape Cod for a visit to their classroom. After a local newspaper reported on the long-shot request, Dan Rather of CBS News picked up the story, bringing it to the nation's attention.
Behind the ambitious effort was history teacher David Bennett, who got the idea while fishing with his father-in-law that September.
“I said 'I’d like to do something to engage the kids, something civically minded,'” remembered Bennett, who retired from teaching in 2005. “And he said, ‘Why don’t you invite the president?’”
At the same time, NPR was planning a live Q&A segment called “Ask the President.” The public was invited to mail in questions, and during the show the network would randomly call out to some who submitted. When the school's invitation seemed unlikely to get Carter to Hyannis, Bennett figured that flooding NPR with student submissions might get the president's attention.
Bennett instructed his students to write out their questions and keep them on hand, just in case a call came. Most kids in the class, Powell said, had laughed off the possibility—herself included. But three weeks later, on October 13, she was sitting at the kitchen table, holding for the president.
Listen to the full NPR conversation between President Carter and Kimberly Powell here
When President Carter came on the line, Powell began confidently: “As you already know, our team of eighth graders sent out an invitation, a note for you to come and teach a history lesson to our school in any way possible that would be convenient to you. We did get a response, but they didn't give us a definite answer. We would like to know if you are really considering to come and when your visit will be? It will be greatly appreciated.”
“Well, thank you, Kimberly,” Carter replied. “I have seen news reports that you all were inviting me to come to Hyannis and to visit your school. I don't know whether I can do it or not. I'll be coming up to Massachusetts again on the 20th of this month to join in dedicating the library of former President John Kennedy, but whether I can visit Hyannis, I don't know. I'll check with my schedulers after this program's over, and we'll let you know directly whether or not I can be there.”
“The very thing I remember that day was him saying my name, pronouncing it with his Southern accent,” Powell remembered. “Growing up on Cape Cod, it was music to my ears.”
She got in one more question, one still relevant today: “Do you have any idea what inflation will be when I get out of school, like, you know, when I'm 18?”
“I hope it will be much less,” Carter replied. “If every American will help with it, then it'll be much less.”
Powell recalled not having a grasp on what inflation meant, but she felt its effect on her parents, a piano teacher and a painting contractor.
“My family had a lot of financial struggles,” Powell said. “I remember them talking about gas in particular and limiting where we went.”
Carter, then 55, was entering what would be his final year as president. A week after the NPR broadcast, he traveled to Massachusetts to dedicate the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. The president didn't make it down to Hyannis. But that radio conversation has always stuck with Powell, now a professor of education at Penn State University.
“To be heard by the president of the United States, even for a few minutes, made me feel like my voice had some worth in the world,” she said.
“It’s lent itself to my belief that education matters, and to honor the voices of my own students in my classroom.”
Audio courtesy of NPR Research, Archives and Data Strategy, and Vanderbilt University Libraries.
