Jimmy Carter was alive for 40% of US history

Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to live to be 100 years old — a feat made even more incredible by the fact that he was alive for 40% of the nation’s history.

When Carter was born in 1924, former President Calvin Coolidge was nearing the end of his first term and was just a month away from his second presidential election. Coolidge died at age 60 in 1933 when Carter was 9 years old and living in Plains, Georgia, at the height of the Great Depression. At that time, former President Franklin D. Roosevelt was at the beginning of his first term.