How did this NC man become close pals with Jimmy Carter? In a way, it’s a fish story.
There are plenty of stories retiree Bob Wilson of Huntersville can tell that provide a keen sense of how close a relationship he developed with former president Jimmy Carter over the past quarter-century.
And this one’s as good a place to start as any:
Back in 2018, Wilson joined Carter and the other members of their small group for their annual Memorial Day weekend fishing expedition in Spruce Creek, Pennsylvania. Because former first lady Rosalynn Carter was dealing with an ear ailment, the couple decided to return to their home in Plains, Georgia, via the ground. Wilson knew that, and he knew the 14-hour-plus drive would almost certainly take them right through Charlotte, so he casually mentioned that they were welcome to drop in on him and his wife, Ineke.
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” Carter told him.
Bob figured it was highly unlikely. Ineke, though, wasn’t taking any chances. She made a preemptive trip to the grocery store to get the ingredients for a salmon salad, just in case. And right after getting home, her phone rang — it was Bob, then not yet retired from his job as a marine contractor, calling from his office beside the Catawba River.
“They’re coming,” he told her.
“Who’s coming?” she asked.
“The president,” Bob said. “In 11 minutes.”
Eleven minutes later, a motorcade led by a Highway Patrol cruiser pulled onto the narrow street in front of the Wilsons’ house, tucked behind the Birkdale Village shopping center in Huntersville. A collection of Secret Service agents spilled out of multiple black cars, one of which also carried their friends Jimmy, then 93, and Rosalynn, then 91.
Ineke got dinner done in record time, and as they ate forkfuls of fish, she told their surprise guests, “You guys are like family.”
Jimmy replied, “That’s how we feel. That’s why we’re here. ’Cause we feel like we get treated as family.”
At this point, you might be wondering how in the world a 78-year-old Charlotte native who went to East Mecklenburg High School six decades ago became fishing buddies with a former world leader in the first place.
Well, that’s a story in and of itself.
‘Wilson, why aren’t you here?’
The association began as a professional one.
In 1985, Jimmy Carter’s involvement with Habitat for Humanity on a national level was building steam. That year, Habitat launched the Jimmy Carter Work Project, which became an annual home-building blitz largely notable because the former president spent long days actually putting in framing, sawing boards, and hammering nails.
Bob Wilson had a company in Mooresville that built marinas and performed dredging services, but he was also looking to get more involved in community service. That year, his name found its way onto a short list of candidates to be national director of Carter’s work project.
The three people ahead of him turned it down.
Wilson led the endeavor for the next six-plus years — including in 1987, when the Carters descended on Charlotte for a hugely successful project in the Optimist Park neighborhood — as the Carter work project evolved from a novel idea into a phenomenon. For that reason, by the time Wilson left the post in 1992, he’d gained the former president’s respect, admiration and gratitude.
But a friendship still hadn’t blossomed. Wilson can trace its beginnings to one particular phone call several years later.
Toward the end of his tenure, Wilson did some initial planning for a Carter build in a poverty-stricken region of the Appalachian Mountains that straddled Tennessee and Kentucky. The project finally happened in 1997, though Wilson had no role in it. At least, not at first.
“I’m in my office,” he recalls, “and the phone rings. And it was Nancy Konigsmark (the late longtime right-hand aide to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter). She said, ‘Wilson, it’s Nancy. Deacon wants to talk to you.’ Deacon was President Carter’s Secret Service code name. I said, ‘Oh! OK.’ And he gets on the phone and says, ‘Wilson, why aren’t you here?’ I said, ‘Uh, I have a business to run. Is that a good enough reason?’ He said, ‘That’s a good reason. But see if you can clear your calendar and come on up and spend some time here.’”
Wilson thought it was unusual, but he also sensed it was a personal invitation, not a business one.
He cleared his calendar, drove 280 miles to Pikeville, Kentucky, and wound up spending a few days there working on a house with the former president. By the time they said goodbye, Wilson says it felt like he was saying goodbye to a friend.
Roughly 2-1/2 years later, Carter reached out to Wilson with an even bigger ask: Would he like to go fly-fishing — in Tierra del Fuego, in southern Argentina?
Yes, of course, Wilson absolutely wanted to go. There was just one small issue: Wilson didn’t know how to fly-fish.
The start of a special relationship
So he did what most people would probably do in a situation like this.
He started buying fishing rods, and he contacted a friend who was an experienced angler to ask for help. “I said, ‘I’m going on this trip and I don’t want to make a fool of myself,’” Wilson recalls. “He had a swimming pool — oh God, I will never forget this — and he (coached me) as I was casting into the swimming pool just trying to get the pattern down.”
But Wilson was still firmly in the novice category when they arrived on the archipelago down in South America in 2000. So Jimmy Carter did what most people would probably do in a situation like this. He taught Wilson everything he knew.
It’s this simple act that bonded Wilson to Carter, a man 20 years his senior.
Wilson explains that while his own father was “a very great guy,” he also grew up as an orphan in Ireland raised by women, and didn’t know much about raising a son. Didn’t know anything about football, didn’t know anything about fishing, and therefore couldn’t give his son any guidance on that stuff.
Carter could, and did. And in those moments standing on the edge of the Rio Grande together, Wilson could feel a special relationship forming. In those moments, he says, Carter felt “kind of like a surrogate father to me.”
Another friend of Carter’s — John Moores, then owner of Major League Baseball’s San Diego Padres — was with them on the Tierra del Fuego trip. Then several months later, on Memorial Day weekend in 2000, both Moores and Wilson were invited to fish with Carter on land in Spruce Creek owned by dairy farmer Wayne Harpster, who would join them. Carlton Hicks, an optometrist from St. Simons Island, Georgia, rounded out the fivesome. (Or, rather, the six-some — Rosalynn always tagged along with a rod, too.)
As for why Carter brought these other three men into his inner circle, Wilson could only guess. He isn’t even sure exactly how he ended up there himself. But he has a theory.
“Jimmy had been beaten (in the election) by a television actor who was very popular, who was very eloquent. Jimmy was not polished as an orator like (Ronald) Reagan was,” Wilson says. “So Jimmy needed something in his life to feel good about himself ... and he latched onto this Habitat thing — not for any personal gain, but to help that fledgling Christian ministry get off (the ground).”
Wilson says the first three Carter work projects didn’t boost Habitat as much as he’d hoped. The Charlotte one in 1987, on the other hand, was a resounding success. “I didn’t do it. ... The community did it,” Wilson says. “But I was the director. So I got some credit for it, and as the thing continued for the next several years, all of a sudden, Jimmy Carter started gaining popularity on that national scene.”
And ultimately, Wilson says, “what we did with the Carter project in those first years, gave him ... some of his self-esteem back, having been beaten by Reagan. I think that’s why I was on the trip.”
And it was the first of many — to places Wilson never dreamed he would go.
‘Carter never forgot where he came from’
Over the next four years, Wilson and the three other men joined Carter on a variety of fishing trips to far-flung places, from the Orinoco River in southern Venezuela to the Ponoy in Russia. On top of that, the trips to Harpster’s land in Pennsylvania became an annual Memorial Day weekend trip tradition.
They were meaningful enough to the ex-Commander-in-Chief that he specifically named Wilson and the others in his 2004 memoir “Sharing Good Times,” referring to them his “informal fishing alliance” and calling it “a special relationship.”
At some point along the way, Ineke (then Bob’s girlfriend and not yet his wife) had muscled her way into the fishing expeditions, thinking Rosalynn deserved female companionship; Jimmy eventually also taught Ineke to fish, in 2012, when the couples vacationed together at Ted Turner’s plantation in Florida.
The following year, when Bob and Ineke told Jimmy they had gotten engaged at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro — a peak the former president had nearly summitted in 1988 — Jimmy offered to marry them.
In October 2014, he made good on his promise: He presided over their wedding in Cornelius and he aced his performance, serving as emcee and taking the lead on everything except for the actual pronouncement (since he wasn’t an ordained officiant in the state of North Carolina).
Perhaps the ceremony’s most memorable moment came when Bob’s 8-year-old grandson, Ben, came to the altar with a rope as Carter talked about the origins of the expression “tying the knot.” Carter then tied the rope into a fisherman’s knot, declaring: “This knot will never be untied.” Bob’s grandson took it as a challenge and untied the knot, much to the horror of his mother. Carter saved the day, tying a new knot during the reception while announcing, “OK, this one will never be untied. Unless you give it to Ben.”
Hundreds of guests howled.
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The following summer, Carter revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with melanoma that spread to his brain. He continued making the Memorial Day fishing trips to Pennsylvania with the guys for a few more years, but they stopped after the one in 2018 — the year that the Carters’ motorcade pulled up in front of the Wilsons’ house.
The last time the men were all in the same place together was in Plains two Julys ago, for a happy occasion, when they toasted Jimmy and Rosalynn at their 75th anniversary party. The next time they get together, it will be a sad one.
Ineke says that the plan, for a long time, was for Bob, Carlton, John and Wayne to be pallbearers at Jimmy’s funeral. “But because he has so many sons and grandsons now, it has changed.” So instead, these four men will be sitting in seats in a prime row at the National Cathedral on that day, and members of the media and likely many other mourners will ask them, Who are you guys?
Bob’s answer will be: “Friends.”
How did you become friends?, they’ll ask.
Bob will shrug, and say, simply: “He extended that friendship to us.”
Why?, they’ll wonder.
And Bob’s answer will be: “Because Jimmy Carter never forgot where he came from. Because he viewed himself very much as a man of the people, a man of the soil, a man just like you — just like me — and because to him, that was special.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
