Think back almost a quarter of a century to January 1977 and the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as the 39th president of the United States. People snickered when he tried to carry his own bags in Washington and were appalled when his wife, Rosalynn, dressed in a ball gown she had worn before.

His brother, Billy, became a media clown prince; his mother, Lillian, a retired nurse who lately had been in the Peace Corps, a charming oddity.

Ronald Reagan trounced Carter in the 1980 election. Americans were fed up with inflation, long lines at gasoline pumps, an economic recession and a failed attempt to rescue Americans taken hostage by students in Iran.

Carter was 54 when he left the White House. In the years since, he has become one of the most politically active former presidents, largely through the Jimmy Carter Work Project for Habitat for Humanity International, a non-profit Christian organization that builds and renovates shelter for the poor throughout the world, and through the Carter Center in Atlanta, which has been involved in international conflict resolution, democracy, health and other issues.

He is thoroughly at ease in the 21st century. Yet Carter's newest book, An Hour Before Daylight, a memoir of his growing-up years in Georgia, reads in some ways as though his childhood were ages ago.

His family was comfortable compared with other families in area of Plains, Ga. That is not to say that theirs was a lush life, but they had an outdoor privy into which chamber pots were emptied, and with the rural-electrification program in the late 1930s, they were among the first families to have electric lights.

Tenants leased houses on the property and helped with the farming. Children were expected to work alongside everyone else, hauling well water, picking cotton and harvesting peanuts, learning blacksmithing and carpentry.

"We farm boys led an active life outdoors, spending our days in the fields and woods, either at work with mules, plows and hoes or, on off days, fishing, riding horses and bikes, hunting, climbing trees and windmills, wading or playing in creeks and muddy ditches, or fighting and wrestling with each other," he writes.

At hog- and beef-killing times, families indulged in great orgies of meat consumption, eating what could not be preserved with salt, smoke or rented freezer space.

Rabid animals and diseases such as polio and even ringworm and hookworm were genuine health threats. Carter's mother worked as a nurse at a nearby hospital and later with private clients.

"There is no way to exaggerate the importance of sickness and medical care in our community for people of both races, or how much my mother's involvement in nursing affected my early years," Carter writes. "There were no miracle drugs in those days."

James Earl Carter Sr. was a profound influence on his oldest son, who coveted his father's approval. In his early teens, under his father's tutelage, Jimmy had saved enough money selling peanuts to purchase some tenant houses of his own.

Social life centered on church and trips to town, and divorce was unheard of. A quiet, observant child could learn much about the accomplishments and foibles of his neighbors.

Although blacks and whites worked alongside each other in the fields, strict rules of segregation prevailed.

Carter mentions among his great childhood mentors Jack Clark, a supervisor on the family farm, and his wife, Rachel; his closest young friend was Alonzo Davis ("A.D."), who lived on the Carter farm with an uncle and aunt.

Before electrification, the family listened to a battery-operated radio, almost always at night.

"The most memorable radio broadcast was in 1938, the night of the return match between heavyweight boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmelling," Carter writes. "The German champion had defeated the black American two years earlier, and the world's attention was focused on the return bout. For our community the fight had heavy racial overtones, with almost unanimous support at our all-white school for the European over the American. A delegation of our black neighbors came to ask Daddy if they could listen to the broadcast, and we put the radio in the window so the assembled crowd in the yard could hear it. The fight ended abruptly, in the first round, with Louis almost killing Schmelling. There was no sound from outside -- or inside -- the house. We heard a quiet, "Thank you, Mr. Earl,' and then our visitors walked silently out of the yard, crossed the road and the railroad tracks, entered the tenant house, and closed the door. Then all hell broke loose, and their celebration lasted all night. Daddy was tight-lipped, but all the mores of our segregated society had been honored."

Custom would alter his deepest friendships.

"Until my last two years of high school, the black boys . . . were my closest friends," Carter writes. "I had a more intimate relationship with them than with any of my white classmates in town. This makes it more difficult for me to justify or explain my own attitudes and actions during the segregation era. A turning point in my relationship with A.D. and my other friend occurred when we were about 14 years old. . . . One day about this time, A.D., Edmund and I approached the gate leading from our barn to the pasture. To my surprise, they opened it and stepped back to let me go through first. . . . It was a small act, but a deeply symbolic one. . . . A precious sense of equality had gone out of our personal relationship, and things were never again the same between them and me."

Carter's writing is simple and elegant, his story interesting. He does not dig deeply into emotional issues, but his observations certainly accomplish his mission as stated in the dedication to the book, to his youngest grandson, Hugo, hoping that it will "someday let him better comprehend the lives of his ancestors."

The rural life Carter experienced in childhood has not evaporated completely, but it is no longer familiar to many of us. That he continues to use the skills learned on his family farm to build sturdy houses for those who cannot afford them says much about the values he learned in that small community in the early half of the 20th century, but not all that long ago.

-- Mary Jane Park is a Times assistant newsfeatures editor.

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AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT: Memories of a Rural Boyhood

By Jimmy Carter

Simon & Schuster, $26

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