Many of us who connected with Harris were drawn to his affable intelligence, generous spirit, and passion for films. Harris’s favorite film, Federico Fellini’s “8 ½, ” inspired the location of the movie house with its iconic address of 812 Cannery Row. Its padded flooring, comfortable pillow seating, and wafting incense provided an enticing way to enjoy films such as “El Topo,” Fellini’s “Satyricon” and “Seven Samurai.”

The most watched film at the 812 was the 1970’s cult hit “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” My brother Mark Shuler was projectionist during that era. He says a tribute to Harris’s meticulous care of the new 35 mm projectors was that he insisted on a daily startup routine to ensure that the machines remained in as close to perfect running condition as possible.  “I personally ran the Rocky Horror Picture Show nearly 1,000 times over the years when it was the only movie at the 812,” he says. “Representatives from 20th Century Fox visited the theater once and were astounded at the flawless condition of the print.” He says Harris’s copy of Rocky Horror remained in top condition for years, when other theaters needed replacements as often as weeks into their runs.

Harris created a novel intermission show at the 812 by splicing together images from a large cache of donated 16 mm commercials. He took the flashy bits without product content and created a multi-projector visual extravaganza. Mark Shuler says, “Customers lay on the pillows, breathing in the scents of coconut and orange peel, dazzled by kaleidoscopic effects as they listened to ‘The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys’ by Traffic.”

Bert Adams expressed the sentiments of regulars who loved these two establishments in a Facebook post:. “The only movie theaters I can remember are the Dream Theater and the 812. Every other movie theatre I’ve ever been in hasn’t been worth remembering.”

Harris’s enthusiasm for film began as a kid. In 1951, his parents gave him a Crown Graphic Gravlex camera. It held magic that opened a world of expression and discovery, setting a course for the rest of his life.  With this tool, he gained skill, an artist’s eye, and a love of photography. Recently he acquired a used Gravlex of the same vintage. “Camera geekery,” he wrote on Facebook, “It’s old, smells, is wonderful and arrived today … Full circle in honor of my parents’ love for all things creative.”

He explored digital filmmaking with the same zeal he brought to celluloid, mastering computer editing and new technology. When 3-D cameras became affordable, Harris taught himself how to produce his own movies, often featuring footage of our natural surroundings. An animal lover, Harris knew how to communicate with wild creatures to encourage their best Cecille B. DeMille film takes.

Spending time with Harris, one learned about advances in both still photography and filmmaking. He dove into the weeds with anyone who would listen about the advances and importance of 3-D technology and would outfit us with the requisite spectacles to watch his own rushes or the latest 3-D creations out of Hollywood.

And there was always popcorn!

His own 3-D full-length movie, “Steinbeck Country: Monterey to Big Sur,” premiered at Lighthouse Cinemas in Pacific Grove in 2011.  A nature and meditation film, it was, as The Herald’s Dennis Taylor wrote, “his love letter to the paradise that has been his home since 1969.”  And though his “Mystery of Dreams” film remains unfinished, it contains some of his finest 3-D footage.

Harris, who possessed a crooner’s voice, was also deeply geeky about microphones and audio processors. His last Facebook posting features an image of his new Tascam mixer with the words, “What a monster! Learning curve in motion! Multi track voices…Amazing!”  As a popular singer and pianist on the Peninsula for 25 years, he traveled to gigs with his keyboard and sound systems. He even removed the front passenger seat of his vintage blue Miata to make room for his equipment.

Kelly Productions represented his appearances at local venues as well as for private parties and corporate clients. Arden Eaton, production and promotion manager of the talent agency, says, “John was an infectious force for positivity. Always singing, always smiling with a warm word for all, John’s legacy as an integral part of the Monterey Peninsula’s artistic community will endure.”

Harris excelled at improvisation. When his friend, singer Linda Purdy, would show up for his gigs, the spontaneous fun and hilarity was contagious she said. Their antics didn’t stop there.

“John called me numerous times to meet him at one of the beaches on the Peninsula,” Purdy said, remembering. “He would have a plan, so I dared not say no. Nor did I want to. After gathering formal attire and outrageous hats, I would arrive as he was arranging his filming equipment. He then positioned me up and down the beach and would direct me unmercifully.  Within minutes, we attracted crowds of onlookers. John always took time to speak with the people at these gatherings. He was in heaven, his audience enthralled!”

Another incident occurred on Los Laureles grade after a delicate medical procedure. “While driving him home over the Grade listening to his favorite music, he said, `Stop the car at the next turnout and boost the music up as loud as you can! We gotta get out and dance until we drop!’  So we did.  Once again, the crowds gathered.  Uncontrollable laughter ensued. That was life with John!”

Harris grew up in Culver, Oregon, but traveled to Los Angeles as a young man. His talents were quickly recognized by celebrities Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis and Ann-Margret, among others, with whom he collaborated as a back-up singer and dancer. He appeared in Ann-Margret’s Las Vegas debut and worked with her on other projects. They developed a lifelong friendship.  He played the Ed Sullivan Show, the Hollywood Palace, met Elvis Presley, and did a USO tour to Asia and around the U.S. Throughout his Hollywood career, he continued filming and maintained an archive of movies and photos of celebrities from that era.

During his five and a half decades on the Peninsula, he lent his expertise to numerous film and audio projects, theater productions, weddings and still photo shoots. He is survived by his brother Bill Harris and his nieces and nephews.

His agent John Kelly sums it up this way: “John was forever the dreamer, always working on new projects, always improving his craft as a performer, always looking forward. He was an entertainer who engaged with his audience in a positive and authentic way. To borrow some words from Bob Dylan, John was forever young, and those of us lucky to know him were graced by his good vibes and limitless talents.”

An announcement will be made later through Kelly Productions about a Celebration of Life for John. A Go Fund Me Account is being set up to cover expenses left in his estate.

Barbara Rose Shuler, who covers classical music and theater for the Herald, met John Harris shortly after he arrived on the Peninsula in 1969.  In addition to their longstanding friendship, they have collaborated professionally on projects over the years,  including voiceovers for his films and studio work related to her morning announcing job with the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

HONOLULU — The last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor has died. Lou Conter was 102.

Conter passed away at his home Monday in Grass Valley following congestive heart failure, his daughter, Louann Daley said.

The Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines in the 1941 attack that launched the United States into World War II. The battleship’s dead account for nearly half of those killed in the surprise attack.

Conter was a quartermaster, standing on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7 that year. Sailors were just beginning to hoist colors or raise the flag when the assault began.

Conter recalled how one bomb penetrated steel decks 13 minutes into the battle and set off more than 1 million pounds (450,000 kilograms) of gunpowder stored below.

The explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 metes) out of the water, he said during a 2008 oral history interview stored at the Library of Congress. Everything was on fire from the mainmast forward, he said.

“Guys were running out of the fire and trying to jump over the sides,” Conter said. “Oil all over the sea was burning.”

His autobiography “The Lou Conter Story” recounts how he joined other survivors in tending to the injured, many of them blinded and badly burned. The sailors only abandoned ship when their senior surviving officer was sure they had rescued all those still alive.

The rusting wreckage of the Arizona still lies in waters where it sank. More than 900 sailors and Marines remain entombed inside.

Conter went to flight school after Pearl Harbor, earning his wings to fly PBY patrol bombers, which the Navy used to look for submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with a “Black Cats” squadron, which conducted dive bombing at night in planes painted black.

In 1943, he and his crew where shot down in waters near New Guinea and had to avoid a dozen sharks. A sailor expressed doubt they would survive, to which Conter replied, “baloney.”

“Don’t ever panic in any situation. Survive is the first thing you tell them. Don’t panic or you’re dead,” he said. They were quiet and treaded water until another plane came hours later and dropped them a lifeboat.

In the late 1950s, he was made the Navy’s first SERE officer — an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. He spent the next decade training Navy pilots and crew on how to survive if they’re shot down in the jungle and captured as a prisoner of war. Some of his pupils used his lessons as POWs in Vietnam.

Conter retired in 1967 after 28 years in the Navy.

Conter was born in Ojibwa, Wisconsin, on Sept. 13, 1921. His family later moved to Colorado where he walked five miles (eight kilometers) one way to school outside Denver. His house didn’t have running water so he tried out for the football team — less for a love of the sport and more because the players could take showers at school after practice.

He enlisted in the Navy after he turned 18, getting $17 a month and a hammock for his bunk at boot camp.

In his later years, Conter became a fixture at annual remembrance ceremonies in Pearl Harbor that the Navy and the National Park Service jointly hosted on the anniversaries of the 1941 attack. When he lacked the strength to attend in person, he recorded video messages for those who gathered and watched remotely from his home in California.

In 2019, when he was 98, he said he liked going to remember those who lost their lives.

“It’s always good to come back and pay respect to them and give them the top honors that they deserve,” he said.

Though many treated the shrinking group of Pearl Harbor survivors as heroes, Conter refused the label.

“The 2,403 men that died are the heroes. And we’ve got to honor them ahead of everybody else. And I’ve said that every time, and I think it should be stressed,” Conter told The Associated Press in a 2022 interview at his California home.

Ettinger, 49, is survived by her brothers Mark and Steve, her aunt and uncle Mary and Kenny Parker — her daughter, Julianna, and her husband, Dan White, whom Ettinger met while she and White were both working at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

“This was in 1998,” wrote Dan White to the Sentinel. “I was a reporter and she was writing wedding announcements when we met. From the beginning, I noticed that she had such a strong spirit, and I could tell she was brilliant, focused and very creative. She was also full of writing ideas and hoped to contribute to journalism in ways that went far beyond her job at the time — writing cute news briefs about couples making their vows. And, of course, I couldn’t help but notice that she was beautiful.”

White said that he had wanted to ask Ettinger out but admitted he was too shy to make a move. So, for a time he just admired Ettinger from afar until one fateful day when the two young writers were brought together by a stolen mail truck.

“I was working on a breaking news story about a strung-out thief who stole a postal truck and was leading the police on a wild chase through the San Lorenzo Valley,” said White. “Amy heard me talking loudly and excitedly about this story to an editor. I mentioned that the thief was from Cupertino. Amy walked over to me and said, “That’s where I’m from, too — Cupertino!”

White said he still owes that thief a thank you. Although the breaking news had broken the ice between them, White was still too shy to ask Ettinger out. Fortunately, one of the Sentinel’s editors recognized the chemistry between the two and gave them free tickets to a revival concert for the American folk band The Kingston Trio, which was held at the Cocoanut Grove. However, the date was a disaster, according to White.

“I was way too cheap to park at the Boardwalk so I left my car in Seabright and the two of us had to walk back on the trestle bridge over the San Lorenzo River,” said White. “At one point a huge rat did a standing long jump over my foot. Amy saw that rat and gave me a look like, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”

Despite the leaping rodent, Ettinger agreed to a second date, which went much better than the first, according to White. They discussed an early memoir White was working on over Polar Bear ice cream.

“Pretty soon we became inseparable,” said White. “In the past 25 years, we were rarely apart unless I was off traveling, or crashing through the wilderness for a book or essay, or she was on a research trip.”

A call to writing

Shortly after Ettinger was born in Rochester, New York, her family moved to Cupertino. Ettinger attended Cupertino High School and was involved in the school’s drama and band programs and also discovered her calling in journalism.

Amy’s brother, Steve Ettinger, said that growing up, he admired his sister’s ability to focus and follow through with her goals, despite obstacles.

“My sister kept to herself much of the time,” said Steve Ettinger. “Reading was a very important pursuit for her, as she would spend hours in bed reading books. One memory I have from our childhood was of us sitting on my bed and watching episodes of “Mission Impossible” and “Star Trek” together.”

While still in high school, Ettinger was chosen to be one of five young contributors for the San Jose Mercury News’ “Our So Called Lives” column (think, “My So-Called Life”) and wrote about the angst and ennui of Generation X.

After high school, Ettinger attended UC Santa Cruz where she majored in American literature and met lifelong friend, Bessie Weiss, in a class taught by literature professor Paul Skenazy.

“I was drawn by her light, our shared love of literature, as well as that incredible laugh that bubbled out of her, and our friendship blossomed immediately,” Weiss wrote to the Sentinel. Although the two friends went down different career paths after college, Ettinger into writing and Weiss into corporate America, they remained close friends.

“Less than a week before she died, Amy made me promise to take my wife to Paris this year after I mentioned it’s something we’ve always wanted to do together,” said Weiss. “I wish I could consult with her about planning the trip, and share the stories and photos from it after we return. But the conversation we started nearly 30 years ago will continue for as long as I am around.”

After graduating from UCSC, Ettinger later earned her master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1999. Before becoming an independent journalist, editor and author, Ettinger served a stint as a reporter for the Monterey Herald. Throughout her career as a freelancer, Ettinger contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Salon, CNN, Newsweek and AARP, among others.

“She realized that she could be raw and elegant and truthful in print in ways that transcended mere speech,” said White. “Her natural shyness fell away when she was writing on deadline. She loved the challenge of it. And she loved the idea of getting out of one’s own way in the writing process. The writing she did was so powerful and intense because it was incredibly direct — she had this way of circumventing a reader’s defense systems. Amy wrote with an absolute minimum of ornamentation. Her style was bold and direct, tender and unsparing.”

Finding the “Sweet Spot”

In 2017, Ettinger’s nonfiction book “Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America” was published by Penguin Random House. The critically acclaimed work is part memoir and travelogue and explores the history of ice cream makers and the ice cream industry across the United States.

“She grew up in Cupertino when the area was making an awkward transition into the tech megalopolis it is now, and she often felt unsettled as a child,” said White. “Ice cream was the one steadying, comforting thing that was always there for her.”

Composing the book was an adventure for Ettinger who traveled the country eating ice cream, riding along in an ice cream truck, learning how to make the sweet treat, and even interviewing Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s fame.

“The book in some ways was a formal exercise for Amy — a kind of dare — ‘Can I write a great, enthralling book about a dairy product? You think I can’t pull it off? Just watch,’ ” said White. “And she did just that, going on NPR several times and speaking to big crowds about her book, and getting all these great reviews. There was definitely an aspect of ‘I’ll show you’ that was hardwired into Amy.”

A writer to the end

White said that one of the more painful aspects of the cancer diagnosis was that Ettinger’s writing career was taking off more than ever and she was invigorated to keep writing.

“It was just so sudden and shocking for all of us,” said White. “Amy and Julianna and I were out visiting my high school pal in Chicago in July of 2023. Amy was troubled by a lump in her abdomen that she’d noticed recently. She was also experiencing exhaustion and some strange swelling in her legs.”

When the family returned to Santa Cruz, Ettinger’s primary care physician referred her to an oncologist, who ultimately diagnosed her with stage-four cancer.

“The oncologist only gave her a few months to live,” said White. “I remember Amy listening to this news calmly while I was just covering my eyes, shaking my head. It didn’t seem real.”

White pointed out that Ettinger loved being a mom and raising their daughter, Julianna, who gave Ettinger strength and respite during the illness.

“Having a kid was one major reason Amy wanted to stay healthy and active for as long as she could,” said White. “For a very short while she was doing pretty well with chemo — it might have bought her an extra month or so, but she drew a really terrible card with this leiomyosarcoma — a truly wretched disease.”

Ettinger taught a popular creative writing class for Stanford University Continuing Studies, and taught the final course a few weeks before she died.

“She would teach her heart out and collapse on the bed afterwards and do it all over again the next week,” said White. “I would try to talk her out of it and she’d say, ‘No, I want to do this.’ I have never, ever seen that sort of focus, determination and energy from anyone, anywhere.”

Last August, Ettinger wrote “I’m Dying at 49. Here’s Why I Have No Regrets,” for the Washington Post. And her follow-up story, “I Have Little Time Left. I Hope my Goodbye Inspires You.” appeared on the Washington Post’s homepage less than two weeks before she died in her home the morning of March 20.

“She was so clear about who she loved, and what she wanted, and what she wished to do with her life,” said White. “Until her diagnosis, she had no way of knowing her life would be abridged — but she lived her life as if she knew that all along.”

LOS ANGELES — M. Emmet Walsh, the character actor who brought his unmistakable face and unsettling presence to films including “Blood Simple” and “Blade Runner,” has died at age 88, his manager said Wednesday.

Walsh died from cardiac arrest on Tuesday at a hospital in St. Albans, Vermont, his longtime manager Sandy Joseph said.

The ham-faced, heavyset Walsh often played good old boys with bad intentions, as he did in one of his rare leading roles as a crooked Texas private detective in the Coen brothers’ first film, the 1984 neo-noir “Blood Simple.”

Joel and Ethan Coen said they wrote the part for Walsh, who would win the first Film Independent Spirit Award for best male lead for the role.

Critics and film geeks relished the moments when he showed up on screen.

Roger Ebert once observed that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

Walsh played a crazed sniper in the 1979 Steve Martin comedy “The Jerk” and a prostate-examining doctor in the 1985 Chevy Chase vehicle “Fletch.”

In 1982’s gritty, “Blade Runner,” a film he said was grueling and difficult to make with perfectionist director Ridley Scott, Walsh plays a hard-nosed police captain who pulls Harrison Ford from retirement to hunt down cyborgs.

Born Michael Emmet Walsh, his characters led people to believe he was from the American South, but he could hardly have been from any further north.

Walsh was raised on Lake Champlain in Swanton, Vermont, just a few miles from the U.S.-Canadian border, where his grandfather, father and brother worked as customs officers.

He went to a tiny local high school with a graduating class of 13, then to Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

He acted exclusively on the stage, with no intention of doing otherwise, for a decade, working in summer stock and repertory companies.

Walsh slowly started making film appearances in 1969 with a bit role in “Alice’s Restaurant,” and did not start playing prominent roles until nearly a decade after that when he was in his 40s, getting his breakthrough with 1978’s “Straight Time,” in which he played Dustin Hoffman’s smug, boorish parole officer.

Walsh was shooting “Silkwood” with Meryl Streep in Dallas in the autumn of 1982 when he got the offer for “Blood Simple” from the Coen brothers, then-aspiring filmmakers who had seen and loved him in “Straight Time.”

“My agent called with a script written by some kids for a low-budget movie,” Walsh told The Guardian in 2017. “It was a Sydney Greenstreet kind of role, with a Panama suit and the hat. I thought it was kinda fun and interesting. They were 100 miles away in Austin, so I went down there early one day before shooting.”

Walsh said the filmmakers didn’t even have enough money left to fly him to New York for the opening, but he would be stunned that first-time filmmakers had produced something so good.

“I saw it three or four days later when it opened in LA, and I was, like: Wow!” he said. “Suddenly my price went up five times. I was the guy everybody wanted.”

In the film he plays Loren Visser, a detective asked to trail a man’s wife, then is paid to kill her and her lover.

Visser also acts as narrator, and the opening monologue, delivered in a Texas drawl, included some of Walsh’s most memorable lines.

“Now, in Russia they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway,” Visser says. “But what I know about is Texas. And down here, you’re on your own.”

He was still working into his late 80s, making recent appearances on the TV series “The Righteous Gemstones” and “American Gigolo.”

And his more than 100 film credits included director Rian Johnson’s 2019 family murder mystery, “Knives Out” and director Mario Van Peebles’ Western “Outlaw Posse,” released this year.

EMERSON, Neb. — Corliss Hassler rushes in the front door of Post 60 Market and heads straight for the produce case.

“I’m back,” she announces.

It’s around lunchtime, but it’s already her second trip in today — this time, she’s picking up a few items for the Friday fish fry at the local Catholic church.

Hassler is a regular customer and investor in the small grocery store, opened in 2022 as a cooperative. The store provides convenience, sure: It’s the only place in town to buy fresh fruits, vegetables and meats. But it’s also a social hub for the northeast Nebraska town of Emerson, population 891.

“The store is the lifeblood of the community,” Hassler said. “We have to keep our store, we have to keep our schools, we have to keep our churches — and it’s all a struggle right now.”

The market opened four years after the closure of the town’s only grocery store. Some 110 community members bought shares, which funded the transformation of a shuttered American Legion post into a brightly lit store packed with fresh and packaged foods.

Preserving grocery stores has been a perennial challenge for rural communities. Small, often declining populations make it tough to turn a profit in an industry known for its razor-thin margins. Increased competition from online retailers, the onslaught of chains such as Dollar General stores and an aging lineup of independent grocers have only made things tougher.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tracked the decline of rural grocery stores.

By 2015, USDA research showed a total of 44 counties had no grocery store at all — all but four of the counties were rural.

In Kansas, 1 in 5 rural stores closed between 2008 and 2018, according to the Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University. No new store has opened in half of the 105 communities that lost grocers over that time.

Proposed legislation at Nebraska’s capitol in Lincoln could provide some relief for stores like Post 60 Market.

If passed, the new law would provide grants and loans for small grocers. It’s among several legislative efforts in the region that aim to tackle the complex problem. In neighboring Kansas and Iowa, lawmakers have introduced bills with similar goals, following the lead of states — including Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota and Oklahoma — that have enacted laws setting up special funds to boost rural grocery stores.

“We’re in a global economy and Amazon’s dominating, but that doesn’t mean we should surrender,” said Kansas state Sen. Rob Olson, a Republican.

For two years in a row, Olson has introduced bills that would provide tax incentives for the development of rural grocery stores. A native of rural Kansas who now represents a suburban Kansas City district, Olson said lawmakers should be investing in grocery stores, broadband and housing to improve rural communities.

“If we think about it and we’re smart about it, there’s plenty of opportunities — all throughout the Midwest especially — to grow these economies,” he said.

The pandemic underscored both the importance and fragility of rural grocery stores, said Jillian Linster, interim policy director at the nonprofit Center for Rural Affairs.

“After the pandemic, we have seen a lot of these local grocery stores just struggling to keep the doors open with all the economic and workforce challenges we face in the current economy and the competition from the big-box retailers,” she said.

Based in Lyons, Nebraska, the center has backed bills in both Nebraska and Iowa this session to provide small grants or loans to grocery stores with fewer than 25 employees in underserved communities. The hope is that providing money to replace a broken freezer or leaky roof could make the difference in keeping stores open.

Aside from preserving fresh food access, Linster said, grocery stores serve a wider social role.

“It’s a place where you see your neighbors, where your teenagers get their first job, where there’s a bulletin board with help wanted and things for sale,” she said. “So it’s a really important part of the social infrastructure in our small rural towns.”

‘A service to the community’

Brian Horak knows his customers.

The general manager of Post 60 Market, he knows the busy mom who runs to the frozen foods aisle to find something for dinner that night. He knows the families that only load up their carts on paydays. And he knows when he should check up on someone who hasn’t been in for an unusually long stretch.

Emerson sits at the convergence of three counties, including one of Nebraska’s poorest.

The market can’t compete with the prices of mega retailers like Walmart. But Horak tries to at least beat the costs found at the regional grocery store chain 20 miles away and loads the shelves with plenty of generic options.

Still, some customers will pay with loose change. Others drop in to rummage through the bin of discounted items nearing their expiration dates.

Remote stores like this can struggle to secure vendors. No bakers will deliver fresh bread here, so all the sandwich bread, buns and cupcakes come in frozen. And the store only gets one delivery of fresh food every Wednesday.

“By Tuesday, the bananas start to look pretty sketchy,” Horak said.

But whatever it lacks in variety, the store makes up for in service. Horak will special order just about anything if customers ask.

On a back shelf, he’s set aside a case of Rice-A-Roni for one man, a pack of small Pepsi bottles for a woman in a nursing home and a case of wet cat food for a woman who feeds strays. One man has a standing order for a case of pickled beets every week.

There have been some months when Horak wasn’t sure Post 60 Market’s doors would remain open.

But things changed for the better in January, when a storm blanketed the region with record snow. The two-lane roads connecting Emerson to Sioux City were impassable for days, pushing many locals to try or rediscover Post 60 Market.

“It was kind of a wake-up call,” he said. “People were so happy the grocery store was here.”

The pending legislation could help with a litany of items on the market’s to-do list: a leaky basement, the rubber gaskets that need replacing on the produce cooler — not to mention the dream of a room to butcher fresh cuts of meat.

Named after the town’s former legion post, the co-op sold common shares for $500 and preferred shares for $1,000. While shareholders could one day see dividends, their investments were in reality more like contributions.

Nathan Mueller, who leads the co-op board, said the store just aims to break even.

“At its heart, this is a business,” he said. “But really, the business is being a service to the community.”

Nebraska state Sen. Teresa Ibach said rural grocery stores, whether they’re for-profit, cooperatives or nonprofits, deserve the state’s support.

“I think the trade-off is, if you’re willing to invest in small local communities, we are willing to invest in you.”

A Republican, Ibach sponsored the legislation that would set aside $4 million over two fiscal years for rural grocers. While the legislation got favorable reviews during its January hearing, Ibach was unsure whether it would advance out of committee.

“It’s got legs and it’s got substance and I hope it does, but we’re halfway through the session already,” she said. “And so who knows what will make it to the floor.”

If approved, the measure could help Greg’s Market in Exeter, Nebraska, about 50 miles west of Lincoln. The store has “a honey-do list a mile long,” said Mitchell Schlegelmilch, who leads the board overseeing its operation.

Just before he heard about the legislation, Schlegelmilch said, a freezer sensor failed, costing some $2,500 in spoiled inventory.

“It was a real punch in the gut,” he told lawmakers at the January hearing. “It just took our breath away.”

Investors aren’t looking to make money or even get their money back, Schlegelmilch said in an interview. Greg’s Market just aims to break even. So something as seemingly small as the failed sensor could pose an existential threat.

The legislation “gave me a sense of relief that maybe there is hope,” he said.

Investing in grocery stores

Kathryn Draeger says rural communities need more than just dollar stores and gas stations.

“We need places where you can buy a kiwi, an onion, potato, beets,” she said.

The director of regional sustainable development partnerships at the University of Minnesota, Draeger works with grocery stores across the state. Aside from the health benefits of fresh food, she said, rural stores are key to building more resilient supply chains since they can procure products from a variety of small vendors.

Draeger advocated for a state program to improve healthy food access that began offering grants to rural and urban stores in 2017. Last year, the state agriculture department funded 15 projects at a cost of $426,862 — though nearly five times as much was requested.

“I believe every rural grocery store we lose is at our own peril,” Draeger said. “There’s so much public good in these small private businesses. That is why this public investment in this private sector is really important. “

Draeger recalled one Minnesota grocer who had to choose between fixing her broken front tooth or her store’s leaky roof.

“She chose the roof,” Draeger said. “So she worked at the cash register at the store she owned without a tooth for over a year.”

Just as important as money, though, is leadership, said North Dakota Democratic state Sen. Kathy Hogan. She co-sponsored a new law last year that made $1 million available to help preserve rural grocery stores. That money will only help if communities have strong leaders willing to work together, she said.

“Sometimes people think money is the answer to everything,” she said. “The secret of the success of this is not so much money but local organization.”

Republican state Sen. Janne Myrdal, another co-sponsor, said the legislation was inspired by the work of grocery stores, communities and schools in the northeast corner of the state. After struggling to find vendors willing to make small deliveries to remote areas, three stores formed a cooperative that can demand more inventory and better prices from suppliers — benefiting consumers, schools and businesses.

“As a conservative, I love seeing that happen,” Myrdal said.

The legislation required a local match from organizers and aims to pull multiple retailers and community organizations together to help stabilize deliveries and costs.

“I don’t believe in just handing out money from the government,” Myrdal said. “It has to rise from the bottom up.”

A town missing its ‘centerpiece’

People like to say the town of Malvern, Iowa, punches above its weight.

Though it’s home to fewer than 1,300 people, the town touts miles of bicycle trails, a community garden and public art sculptures. On Main Street: two restaurants, medical clinics, a bank, a pharmacy and even a fitness center.

But a fenced-in gaping hole is an obvious reminder of what’s missing: the town’s staple grocery store, lost in a 2021 fire.

Tom Mulholland was the fourth-generation owner of Mulholland Grocery, which traces its history to the 1870s.

Since the fire, the community has rallied around him. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, funded a documentary short film about the effort to rebuild the grocery store last year.

But even with an Oscar-winning documentarian as the director and scores of headlines, Mulholland has struggled. He’s faced problems with insurance, finances and construction headaches that set the rebuild back.

When the store was open, it was a hub of activity. People would drive long distances to buy from his meat counter. And in times of crisis, such as a recent flood in the area, customers would hand him cash, knowing he’d get it to the folks who needed it most.

“It’s those little things about being human and caring about your community and others that add up,” he said.

Mulholland, 63, could have walked away from the store. But he said it’s too important to the community — and his family. The morning after the fire, he wrote an apology to his ancestors on Facebook.

In an interview, he said: “My great-grandfather and my grandfather, everybody put in so many decades of sweat and tears and frustration and joy. And on my watch, it disappeared.”

After two years, people around town have grown weary of waiting for a store.

“In here it’s a big topic of conversation,” said Janella May, who owns C&M’s Cafe with her husband.

It’s a Main Street institution known for its ice cream and Cheeseburger Saturdays — $4.99 for a burger and fries. Weekday mornings, the place is home to a coffee klatch — a few older men around town have their own key to get in before the place opens.

“We need it here,” she said of the grocery store. “It’s important.”

Without Mulholland Grocery, Malvern residents must drive 15 minutes to reach another small-town grocery store or a half-hour to reach supermarket chains over near Omaha.

The absence of the grocery store is a sharp contrast to Malvern’s otherwise encouraging trajectory.

Some $40 million worth of new projects are in the works in the town, including public school renovations, a new subdivision and a new early education center.

“We’re a growing town,” said Jay Burdic, the president of Malvern Bank.

The third generation of his family to own the bank, Burdic is bullish on the community’s future.

But every day brings a reminder of what’s missing: His desk overlooks Main Street, directly across from the empty grocery store lot.

“It was the centerpiece of our Main Street,” he said. “And now it’s just a hole in the ground.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

NEW YORK — Carl Weathers, a former NFL linebacker who became a Hollywood action movie and comedy star, playing nemesis-turned-ally Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” movies, facing-off against Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Predator” and teaching golf in “Happy Gilmore,” has died. He was 76.

Matt Luber, his manager, said Weathers died Thursday. His family issued a statement saying he died “peacefully in his sleep.”

Weathers was as comfortable flexing his muscles on the big screen in “Action Jackson” as he was joking around on the small screen in such shows as “Arrested Development,” Weathers was perhaps most closely associated with Creed, who made his first appearance as the cocky, undisputed heavyweight world champion in 1976’s “Rocky,” starring Sylvester Stallone.

“It puts you on the map and makes your career, so to speak. But that’s a one-off, so you’ve got to follow it up with something. Fortunately those movies kept coming, and Apollo Creed became more and more in people’s consciousness and welcome in their lives, and it was just the right guy at the right time,” he told The Daily Beast in 2017.

Most recently, Weathers has starred in the Disney+ hit “The Mandalorian,” appearing in all three seasons.

Creed, who appeared in the first four “Rocky” movies, memorably died in the ring of 1984’s “Rocky IV,” going toe-to-toe with the hulking, steroided-using Soviet Ivan Drago, played by Dolph Lundgren. Before he entered the ring, James Brown sang “Living in America” with showgirls and Creed popped up on a balcony in a Star-Spangled Banner shorts and waistcoat combo and an Uncle Sam hat, dancing and taunting Drago.

A bloodied Creed collapses in the ring after taking a vicious beating, twitches and is cradled by Rocky as he dies, inevitably setting up a fight between Drago and Rocky. But while Creed is gone, his character’s son, Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed, would lead his own boxing trilogy starting in 2015.

Weathers went on to 1987’s “Predator,” where he flexed his pecs alongside Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and a host of others, and 1988’s nouveau blaxploitation flick “Action Jackson,” where he trains his flamethrower on a bad guy and asks, “How do you like your ribs?” before broiling him.

He later added a false wooden hand to play a gold pro for the 1996 comedy classic “Happy Gilmore” opposite Adam Sandler and starred in Dick Wolf’s short-lived spin-off series “Chicago Justice” in 2017 and in Disney’s “The Mandalorian,” earning an Emmy Award nomination in 2021.

Weathers grew up admiring actors such as Woody Strode, whose combination of physique and acting prowess in “Spartacus” made an early impression. Others he idolized included actors Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte and athletes Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, stars who broke the mold and the color barrier.

“There are so many people that came before me who I admired and whose success I wanted to emulate, and just kind of hit the benchmarks they hit in terms of success, who created a pathway that I’ve been able to walk and find success as a result. And hopefully I can inspire someone else to do good work as well,” he told the Detroit News 2023. “I guess I’m just a lucky guy.”

Weathers played college football at San Diego State University — he majored in theater — and went on to play for one season in the NFL, for the Oakland Raiders, in 1970.

“When I found football, it was a completely different outlet,” says Weathers told the Detroit News. “It was more about the physicality, although one does feed the other. You needed some smarts because there were playbooks to study and film to study, to learn about the opposition on any given week.”

After the Raiders, he joined the Canadian Football League, playing for two years while finishing up his studies during the offseason at San Francisco State University. He graduated with a B.A. in drama in 1974.

After appearing in several films and TV shows, including “Good Times,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Starsky & Hutch,” as well as fighting Nazis alongside Harrison Ford in “Force 10 From Navarone,” Weathers landed his knockout role — Creed. He told The Hollywood Reporter that his start in the iconic franchise was not auspicious.

He was asked to read with the writer, Stallone, then unknown. Weathers read the scene but felt it didn’t land and so he blurted out: “I could do a lot better if you got me a real actor to work with,” he recalled. “So I just insulted the star of the movie without really knowing it and not intending to.” He also lied that he had any boxing experience.

Later in life, Weathers developed a passion for directing, helming episodes of “Silk Stalking” and and the Lorenzo Lamas vehicle “Renegade.” He directed a season three episode of “The Mandalorian.”

Weathers introduced himself to another generation when he portrayed himself as an opportunistic and extremely thrifty actor who becomes involved with the dysfunctional clan at the heart of “Arrested Development.”

The Weathers character likes to save money by making broth from discarded food — “There’s still plenty of meat on that bone” and “Baby, you got a stew going!” — and, for the right price, agrees to become an acting coach for delusional and talent-free thespian Tobias Funke, played by David Cross.

Weathers is survived by two sons.

WASHINGTON — Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Arizona rancher’s daughter who became a voice of moderate conservatism as the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, was memorialized by President Joe Biden on Tuesday as a pioneer in the legal world who inspired generations of women.

Biden and Chief Justice John Roberts were among those who spoke at her funeral at Washington National Cathedral. O’Connor retired from the high court in 2006 after more than two decades, and died Dec. 1 at age 93.

“Sandra Day O’Connor, daughter of the American West, was a pioneer in her own right — breaking down the barriers in the legal and political worlds and the nation’s consciousness,” Biden said. “To her, the Supreme Court was the bedrock — the bedrock of America.”

Biden, referring to O’Connor’s trailblazing career in the courts, added: “How she embodied such attributes under such pressure and scrutiny helped empower generations of women in every part of American life.”

O’Connor was nominated in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan. Largely unknown on the national scene until her appointment, she would come to be referred to by commentators as the nation’s most powerful woman.

O’Connor wielded considerable influence on the nine-member court, generally favoring states in disputes with the federal government and often siding with police when they faced claims of violating people’s rights. Her impact could perhaps best be seen, though, on the court’s rulings on abortion. She twice helped form the majority in decisions that upheld and reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, the decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Thirty years after that decision, a more conservative court overturned Roe, and the opinion was written by the man who took her place, Justice Samuel Alito.

O’Connor was a top-ranked graduate of Stanford’s law school in 1952, but quickly discovered that most large law firms at the time did not hire women. She nevertheless built a career that included service as a member of the Arizona Legislature and state judge before her appointment to the Supreme Court at age 51.

When she first arrived, there wasn’t even a women’s bathroom anywhere near the courtroom. That was soon rectified, but she remained the court’s only woman until 1993.

In a speech before her casket lay in repose Monday, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor remembered O’Connor as a trailblazer and a “living example that women could take on any challenge, could more than hold their own in any spaces dominated by men and could do so with grace.”

President Barack Obama awarded O’Connor the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

She died in Phoenix of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness. Her survivors include a brother, three sons and grandchildren.

The family has asked that donations be made to iCivics, the group she founded to promote civics education.

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

Justice O’Connor said her earliest memory is of sounds. “In a place of all-encompassing silence, any sound is something to be noted and remembered. When the wind is not blowing, it is so quiet you can hear a beetle scurrying across the ground or a fly landing on a bush… When the wind blows, as it often does, there are no trees to rustle and moan.”

This is how she eased into her autobiography, slowing the reading down, inviting her audience to get in touch with the place that formed her. She spent the first eight pages of “Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest,” co-authored with younger brother H. Alan Day, working through the senses of sight and sound to give readers a sense of her.

In 2003, the year Random House released her book, during a political event in San Francisco, Justice O’Connor signed a copy to my parents, who quietly requested that she sign five more, for their children. She obliged.

The way she approached her story was same way Justice O’Connor worked to uphold the law, by creating context for who she was and what she represented. O’Connor, who lost her husband of 57 years, John Jay O’Connor, to Alzheimer’s disease in 2009, succumbed to her own struggle with dementia on Friday. She was 93.

Reportedly, hearing is also the last sense to depart just before we die.

Growing up on the Lazy B grounded O’Connor and made her strong, giving her a sense of self-reliance and the skills that supported independence, while driving tractors and cattle and learning how to read a situation quickly before firing.

“She has shown, time and time again, that she is a true cowgirl,” said the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2015. In 1993, Justice Ginsburg accepted President Bill Clinton’s nomination, taking her seat as the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Justice O’Connor was the first, having accepted President Ronald Regan’s 1981 nomination to the Bench, calling her “truly a person for all seasons, possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity, and devotion to the public good, which have characterized the 101 brethren who have preceded her.”

“High Lonesome” was the descriptive name given a deep well that stood sentinel over a large, barren prairie on the Lazy B Ranch. It is, on occasion, a fitting description for a Supreme Court Justice, sitting solitary on high, upholding the law.

“It looks like a number-10 earthquake to me,” O’Connor said, as reported in the Monterey Herald in 2004, when addressing an assembly of federal judges gathered in Monterey to discuss a Supreme Court decision on how criminals were sentenced.

Justice O’Connor reportedly took the long view when considering issues such as affirmative action in higher education, and the government’s detention of enemy combatants. Hers was the key vote in a 5-4 decision to uphold the use of racial preferences in admission to the University of Michigan Law School.

Judge Raymond Fisher of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, who moderated the session with O’Connor, called her ruling “the most important decision in a case dealing with race and education since Brown v. Board of Education a half-century ago,” The Herald reported.

An author with ideas

A quick scroll down the homepage of the Pebble Beach Authors & Ideas Festival website, where headshots of past speakers line up like a playbill, reveals that Justice O’Connor had spoken at the festival. In fact, she spoke twice during the 17 years of a now legendary weekend event which will continue in September 2024.

“I was an acquaintance of Justice O’Connor’s husband, John,” said festival founder Jim McGillen. “After he passed, I called her and invited her to the festival. To my amazement, she accepted, not once, but twice.”

The first time McGillen collected Justice O’Connor at the airport and delivered her to her lodging at a prominent golf resort, she invited him to her room to join her, with her brother and his fiancé, for a tumbler of scotch, neat, no ice.

“As we sat there, sipping scotch and talking about golf — she and her husband were wonderful golfers — all I could think about,” McGillen said, “was if the guys at my grammar school could see me now.”

A proponent of civics education, O’Connor, who founded the nonprofit iCivics and intended to build a civics curriculum for every school in the nation, used the Authors & Ideas Festival as a platform for her cause, which included introducing innovative online games and resources.

“Justice O’Connor was such a proponent of civics education,” McGillen said. “She was disappointed that so many school districts in our country had eliminated civics in the curriculum. She was very enthusiastic and effective in getting that message out, but I’m not sure she was ultimately successful in reinstating civics in schools.”

Nevertheless, the Sandra Day O’Connor Award for the Advancement of Civics Education honors an organization, court, or individual who has promoted, inspired, or innovated in the field of civics education.

In her second appearance at the Authors & Ideas Festival, O’Connor, with her brother and coauthor of their book, “Lazy B,” spoke about growing up as a cowgirl and how that influenced her life.

“It is possible to survive and even make a living in formidable terrain,” she wrote in her book. “It takes planning, patience, skill and endurance.”

Perhaps she was talking about more than life on the ranch.

“Justice O’Connor loved being a cowgirl and loved growing up on a ranch,” McGillen said. “She also pointed out during her talk that she went to Stanford Law School and was a very good student. Yet, when she graduated, she couldn’t get a job. She contacted 40 law firms and was told they didn’t hire women as lawyers.”

She did manage to get hired by a law firm, McGillen says, but they said they couldn’t pay her until they could raise more money. “She went two months without getting paid. I sensed it was almost like a secretarial job, initially. We know she did well after that.”

During her second visit to address the Authors & Ideas Festival, McGillen invited Justice O’Connor to stay for dinner on the first night. She declined the invitation, citing plans she’d made to join sorority sisters. Yet, that evening, she stopped by McGillen’s table and asked if she and her “sisters” could join them after all. He pantomimed irritation before escorting O’Connor and her guests to their table.

“What I remember and admire most about Sandra Day O’Connor,” said McGillen, “is that she was really nice. Accessible. She didn’t put on airs; she was warm and friendly. And really firm in her convictions. She and I hit it off, and I really liked her—first because I admired her as a Supreme Court Justice, but mostly, we just liked being around each other.”

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the diplomat with the thick glasses and gravelly voice who dominated foreign policy as the United States extricated itself from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China, died Wednesday, his consulting firm said. He was 100.

With his gruff yet commanding presence and behind-the-scenes manipulation of power, Kissinger exerted uncommon influence on global affairs under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, earning both vilification and the Nobel Peace Prize. Decades later, his name still provoked impassioned debate over foreign policy landmarks long past.

Kissinger’s power grew during the turmoil of Watergate, when the politically attuned diplomat assumed a role akin to co-president to the weakened Nixon.

“No doubt my vanity was piqued,” Kissinger later wrote of his expanding influence. “But the dominant emotion was a premonition of catastrophe.”

A Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family in his teens, Kissinger in his later years cultivated the reputation of respected statesman, giving speeches, offering advice to Republicans and Democrats alike and managing a global consulting business. He turned up in President Donald Trump’s White House on multiple occasions. But Nixon-era documents and tapes, as they trickled out over the years, brought revelations — many in Kissinger’s own words — that sometimes cast him in a harsh light.

Never without his detractors, Kissinger after he left government was dogged by critics who argued that he should be called to account for his policies on Southeast Asia and support of repressive regimes in Latin America.

For eight restless years — first as national security adviser, later as secretary of state, and for a time in the middle holding both titles — Kissinger ranged across the breadth of major foreign policy issues. He conducted the first “shuttle diplomacy” in the quest for Middle East peace. He used secret channels to pursue ties between the United States and China, ending decades of isolation and mutual hostility.

He initiated the Paris negotiations that ultimately provided a face-saving means — a “decent interval,” he called it — to get the United States out of a costly war in Vietnam. Two years later, Saigon fell to the communists.

And he pursued a policy of detente with the Soviet Union that led to arms control agreements and raised the possibility that the tensions of the Cold War and its nuclear threat did not have to last forever.

At age 99, he was still out on tour for his book on leadership. Asked in July 2022 interview with ABC whether he wished he could take back any of his decisions, Kissinger demurred, saying: “I’ve been thinking about these problems all my life. It’s my hobby as well as my occupation. And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.”

Even then, he had mixed thoughts on Nixon’s record, saying “his foreign policy has held up and he was quite effective in domestic policy” while allowing that the disgraced president had “permitted himself to be involved in a number of steps that were inappropriate for a president.”

As Kissinger turned 100 in May 2023, his son David wrote in The Washington Post that his father’s centenary “might have an air of inevitability for anyone familiar with his force of character and love of historical symbolism. Not only has he outlived most of his peers, eminent detractors and students, but he has also remained indefatigably active throughout his 90s.”

Asked during a CBS interview in the leadup to his 100th birthday about those who view his conduct of foreign policy over the years as a kind of “criminality,” Kissinger was nothing but dismissive.

“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger said. “It wasn’t conceived that way. It wasn’t conducted that way.”

Kissinger was a practitioner of realpolitik — using diplomacy to achieve practical objectives rather than advance lofty ideals. Supporters said his pragmatic bent served U.S. interests; critics saw a Machiavellian approach that ran counter to democratic ideals.

He was castigated for authorizing telephone wiretaps of reporters and his own National Security Council staff to plug news leaks in Nixon’s White House. He was denounced on college campuses for the bombing and allied invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, intended to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines to communist forces in South Vietnam.

That “incursion,” as Nixon and Kissinger called it, was blamed by some for contributing to Cambodia’s fall into the hands of Khmer Rouge insurgents who later slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians.

Kissinger, for his part, made it his mission to debunk what he referred to in 2007 as a “prevalent myth” — that he and Nixon had settled in 1972 for peace terms that had been available in 1969 and thus had needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives.

He insisted that the only way to speed up the withdrawal would have been to agree to Hanoi’s demands that the U.S. overthrow the South Vietnamese government and replace it with communist-dominated leadership.

Pudgy and messy, Kissinger incongruously acquired a reputation as a ladies’ man in the staid Nixon administration. Kissinger, who had divorced his first wife in 1964, called women “a diversion, a hobby.” Jill St. John was a frequent companion. But it turned out his real love interest was Nancy Maginnes, a researcher for Nelson Rockefeller whom he married in 1974.

In a 1972 poll of Playboy Club Bunnies, the man dubbed “Super-K” by Newsweek finished first as “the man I would most like to go out on a date with.”

Kissinger’s explanation: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Yet Kissinger was reviled by many Americans for his conduct of wartime diplomacy. He was still a lightning rod decades later: In 2015, an appearance by the 91-year-old Kissinger before the Senate Armed Services Committee was disrupted by protesters demanding his arrest for war crimes and calling out his actions in Southeast Asia, Chile and beyond.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in the Bavarian city of Fuerth on May 27, 1923, the son of a schoolteacher. His family left Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in Manhattan, where Heinz changed his name to Henry.

Kissinger had two children, Elizabeth and David, from his first marriage.

The late AP Diplomatic Writer Barry Schweid contributed to this report.

ATLANTA — Rosalynn Carter was memorialized Tuesday as a matriarch who felt more comfortable among the impoverished and vulnerable than world leaders, as a rare gathering of all living U.S. first ladies and multiple presidents, including her 99-year-old husband Jimmy Carter in the front row, mourned her.

The tribute service at Glenn Memorial Church in Atlanta marked the second day of a three-day schedule of public events celebrating the former first lady and global humanitarian who died Nov. 19 at home in Plains, Georgia, at the age of 96. Tributes began Monday in the Carters’ native Sumter County and continued in Atlanta.

“My mother was the glue that held our family together through the ups and downs and thicks and thins of our family’s politics,” her son James Earl “Chip” Carter III said.

Related: Photos from the memorial service, where the nation’s leaders gathered to mourn Rosalynn Carter

The former president, who is 10 months into home hospice care and hadn’t been seen in public since September, watched from his wheelchair, reclined a bit with his legs up and covered by a blanket with his wife’s face on it, with Chip and his daughter Amy holding his hands. Their other sons, Jeff and Jack, flanked them.

The former president stayed Monday night at The Carter Center, CEO Paige Alexander said, steps from where the former first lady lay in repose.

“He never wants to be very far from her,” she said. “He had a good night. He’s rested.”

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden, their longtime friends, were among the dignitaries. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, along with former first ladies Melania Trump, Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, paid their respects, as did Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff. Georgia’s U.S. senators and Gov. Brian Kemp and his wife Marty Kemp joined more than 1,000 people in the sanctuary. Former Presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush were invited but did not attend.

The service reflected Rosalynn Carter’s status as a global figure while emphasizing her more private profile as a family matriarch who preferred a simple life and held a deep religious faith.

“She had met kings and queens, presidents, others in authority, powerful corporate leaders and celebrities,” Chip Carter said. “She said the people that she felt the most comfortable with and the people she enjoyed being with the most were those that lived in absolute abject poverty.”

The pews filled with political power players, but front and center were her children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren — all surrounding Jimmy Carter, who grieved not as a former president, but as her partner of 77 years.

The speakers came from many chapters of her long life: Chip as the son who remembers his once-shy mother coming into her own in business and politics; Kathryn Cade as the White House aide who stayed on as a close adviser as Rosalynn Carter helped build The Carter Center and its global reach; Judy Woodruff as the journalist who covered the Carter presidential campaign; and Amy, who read a love note her father wrote to her mother 75 years before.

“Her time as first lady was really just one chapter in a life that was about caring for others,” Cade said.

Woodruff recalled Rosalynn Carter lobbying lawmakers, campaigning separately from her husband, attending Cabinet meetings and playing key roles — including being the first presidential adviser to suggest Camp David as a negotiating place for Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin. The decision led to historic peace accords between the two countries.

“Without Rosalynn Carter, I don’t believe there would have been a President Carter,” Woodruff said.

Whether Jimmy Carter would participate was a day-by-day question. It was his first public appearance since September, when he and Rosalynn Carter rode together in the Plains Peanut Festival parade, visible only through open windows in a Secret Service vehicle. Jimmy Carter, who was with his wife during her final hours, did not appear publicly during any part of a public motorcade through and wreath-laying ceremony Monday at Rosalynn Carter’s alma mater, Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus.

Alexander said the trip to Atlanta was “hard” for the former president but “this is her last trip up and it’s probably his, too. … He’s determined.”

The Carters married in 1946 and became the longest-married presidential couple in U.S. history. Jimmy Carter is the longest-lived president; Rosalynn Carter was the second-longest lived first lady, trailing only Bess Truman, who died at 97.

Chip Carter recalled how his mom got him into rehab for drug and alcohol addiction.

“My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever met,” he said. “And pretty to look at, too.”

Indeed, the Carters, perhaps much more because of him than her, never settled comfortably into Washington power circles, even after winning the White House. They were later on the periphery of the unofficial “Presidents Club” that has made friends out of former White House occupants who once operated as rivals and reconvenes publicly — in whole or in part — for inaugurations and funerals.

Biden, who plans to eulogize Jimmy Carter at his state funeral when the time comes, is indisputably the friendliest ally Carter has had in the Oval Office since leaving Washington in 1981.

Rosalynn Carter’s funeral will take place Wednesday in Plains, with an invitation-only service at Maranatha Baptist Church, where the Carters have been members since returning to Georgia after his presidency. She will be buried after a private graveside service on a plot the couple will share, visible from the front porch of the home they built before Jimmy Carter’s first political campaign in 1962.

Associated Press Writer Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.