PLAINS: Mourners began paying their respects to Jimmy Carter on Saturday, as a carefully choreographed six-day farewell for America’s longest-lived president got underway.
US flags have been flying at half-staff around the country since Carter died on December 29 at age 100 in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.
The procession got underway when US Secret Service agents from his current and former protective details carried his flag-draped casket to a hearse for a tour through Plains.
Crowds gathered along the roadside to say their goodbyes, with many waving small American flags, snapping photographs or saluting as the motorcade rolled slowly past.
The black hearse bearing his remains paused at Carter’s boyhood family peanut farm, where a bell was rung 39 times in honor of America’s 39th president. Staff of the National Park Service, which operates the farm, stood in somber, silent tribute.
“He was a man that didn’t walk around proud, he was an everyday normal person,” William Brown, 71, told AFP while waiting for the motorcade in Plains. “We’re going to miss him.”
Later Saturday Carter’s body was set to be driven to Atlanta for a brief stop and moment of silence at the Georgia State Capitol, where Carter served as a state senator before becoming governor.
From there he will be escorted to the Carter Presidential Center where he will lie in repose from 7:00 pm on Saturday (0000 GMT Sunday) to 6:00 am Tuesday to allow the public to pay their respects.
Later that morning Carter’s remains will be flown from a military base in Georgia to Joint Base Andrews outside Washington on a US Air Force plane dubbed Special Air Mission 39.
A motorcade will then transport the body of the former commander-in-chief to the US Navy Memorial, several blocks from the White House.
Carter, who graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946, and served on submarines, will be transferred from a hearse to a horse-drawn caisson for a funeral procession to the US Capitol.
Military pallbearers will carry his flag-draped casket to the Capitol rotunda where his body will lie in state, surrounded by a guard of honor of service members, until 7:00 am Thursday.
Carter will be the 13th former US president to lie in state in the Capitol. Abraham Lincoln, assassinated in 1865, was the first.
A national funeral service is to be held Thursday at the National Cathedral, an Episcopal church in Washington which also hosted state funerals for former presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.
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