Baseball Talk ... and Talk ... and Talk ... from Jimmy Carter's Momma

Jimmy Carter's mom loooooved the Dodgers -- the Brooklyn Dodgers. The former president told me so when I interviewed him this week: "She adopted the Dodgers as her team because of them letting Jackie Robinson play," and she journeyed from Georgia to Brooklyn to see his first game there.

While Miz Lillian "hated" seeing the team move to Los Angeles, she reconciled herself, and was soon following the games via a huge antenna set up out by her fishpond. When Carter was in the White House, Miz Lillian somehow finagled and got her hands on Tommy Lasorda's private phone number.

"On occasion," Carter told me, "she would call him on the phone and give him a hard time" about how he handled some play or player. Nowadays, whenever Lasorda happens to run into Carter, he tells the former president that "he's glad that my mother used to have his phone number, but he's kinda glad that it's more quiet now."

Carter was in Los Angeles promoting his tribute book to his late mother, A Remarkable Mother. Feel like hearing the entire interview?

Comments

[cktirumalai]

Some men-- from presidents to poets and professors-- do have remarkable mothers. If it has not been done, perhaps someone is at work on a book on presidents and their mothers.

[ceti]

Too bad that the Dodgers won the World Series the year after Jimmy Carter left the White House.