Jimmy Carter and Warm Ham - A Historical Porkmoustache Interlude

It is among our nation's greatest moments when the rabble majority
vote to elect a peanut farmer from small town Georgia to preside.
That was the case in 1976 and the living was good, until 1977,
when one of many gasoline crises befell the nation. Gas prices crept
up to a startling $0.85/gallon and sometimes average Americans had to wait in the gas station queue for over an hour. Wintertime household electric bills were sometimes in the tens of dollars. It was devastating!

The future looked bleak and heat was hard to come by. American
children made fires from their Lincoln Logs. Teens burned the
flag…although that seemed to be in protest of something, rather than
to keep warm. And mothers and fathers looked to each other with
furrowed brow, anxious for some financial reprieve, or at least a
little hope.


Luckily, Jimmy Carter, fearless leader and meaty innovator that he
was, found a solution. Or at least he is credited with the heroics of
the day, but we all know that behind every great man (before the men
of the Nineties) was a great woman. One afternoon in the White House
where the thermostat was kept at a chilly 62 degrees, as Rosalynn
sipped her Coca-Cola she noticed her usually rugged husband looking a bit under the weather, sniffling beneath his favorite pulled pork
barbeque moustache. It was then that she realized the problematic
pulled pork was just too light a lip hair. The man needed a warmer
moustache! As a good Southern woman, she did not badger the man into growing one, but simply planted the seed of the idea so that he might think he thought of the idea himself. And her little plan worked.

Later that week, after growing out a handsome, thick pork moustache,
President Carter addressed the nation, "With my fellow Americans in
turning down the thermostat, I will grow Smithfield ham moustache to keep warm."