In 1976, Celestine Sibley Covered Jimmy Carter’s Nomination With a Dry Cleaner’s VIP Tag
Editor’s Note: This excerpt from a 1976 Democratic Convention dispatch by Celestine Sibley, who among her other tasks, covered the Georgia state legislature for years, was originally published in the 2001 collection of her journalism, “Celestine Sibley, Reporter,” edited by Richard L. Eldredge. The following is the 2001 introduction to the piece:
Having never covered a national political convention prior to 1976’s Democratic National Convention in New York City and the Republican Convention in Kansas City later that summer, Sibley forever claimed she was nervous about not getting access to key events.
“She was not nervous,” says Jim Minter, who, as the AJC’s managing editor at the time, sent her to the conventions. “That may have been her act, mind you. She was a tough reporter and one of the most-read people on the staff. It was a no-brainer to send her.”
In the end, Sibley gained access to everyone, including the presidential nominee’s mother, “Miss Lillian” Carter. The matriarch invited “Christine from down-home” to sit with her in her hotel room as Carter anxiously awaited a meeting with the cast members of her favorite TV show, “All My Children.”
July 14, 1976
By Celestine Sibley
New York — Who says New Yorkers are tough? Who says Democrats are well-organized?
They’re not even observant.
After all The New York Times said about the many-colored passes and pecking order in the press (a red pass being better than a peach one, for instance, and a mauve one being best of all), I’ve been getting around a full day on a Roswell, Georgia dry cleaner’s ticket.
It’s pale green and it says in neat-not-gaudy black letters: “V.I.P.” If it hadn’t rained the night the convention opened, I wouldn’t have known what a treasure I had. But I hauled out my raincoat Tuesday morning and there it was, assuring me in agate type that my old coat (called “this garment”) had been given V.I.P. treatment “but the spots remaining cannot be removed without damage to the color or fabric.”
Then a bit further down it notes: “We bring this to you attention so that you will know that we did not overlook it.”
On the off chance that the dry cleaner’s apology (reproach?) might get me in more places than the heavy load of passes issued by the chairman of the Democratic Party, I left the ticket on my coat.
In rapid order, I was admitted to the bedroom of [Former New York Governor] Averell Harriman’s secretary to await an interview with him. He was busy, she said, with interviews lined up for hours to come. Then she glanced at my dry cleaning ticket and added, “But I know he will want to see YOU!”
To do her credit, when I explained to Mrs. Margaret Chapman that I was an imposter, not really a V.I.P. at all, she laughed heartily and made me all the more welcome. I was glad because the atmosphere in Averell Harriman’s suite at the Statler Hilton was Old World elegant, bordering on the exotic.
I wasn’t surprised at the fresh pink roses in the vase in the living room but the sight of a woman (a maid maybe?) pressing Mrs. Harriman’s underwear on a portable ironing board set up in the bedroom was a dizzying view of how the Democratic Party’s eldest and perhaps richest and most stylish elder statesman retains a hold on the finer things.
Still called “governor,” although he has been many other things in government since the 1930s, including ambassador to Russia and special envoy to Churchill and Stalin in the World War II years. Gov. Harriman is now at 84 the Democratic Party’s Washington adviser on foreign policy, a New York delegate at large and a wingding of a Jimmy Carter supporter.
“Of course, they are all so different,” Harriman said of the candidates of the last 40 years. “Gov. Carter has the unique faculty of understanding people, of talking to his audience. That was a quality Roosevelt had. I think he compares with Roosevelt more than anybody else.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, said the old Democrat, smiling reminiscently, “used to glory in his enemies — and so did Harry Truman in a different kind of way. I don’t see that in Carter. He has enormous sympathies with the problems of people and, unlike the Republican who says he wants to force people to work, Carter believes that if the jobs are available, the people will take them.”
My dry cleaning tag and I bowed out on that and left the old governor to a Newsday photographer.
The next door I intended to open was that of the Persian Room at the Plaza, where the American Association of Retired Persons was meeting and the candidate’s mother “Miss Lillian” was expected to be in attendance.
Getting to the Plaza from Madison Square Garden might give your ordinary country bumpkin a little trouble. Not one wearing a Roswell dry cleaner’s tag.
Policemen bowed and took my arm and escorted me to the entrance of subway stations. Token sellers gasped at the V.I.P. and shouted to me over the roar of the trains exact, if unintelligible, directions for getting to my destination. Other passengers smiled and when I asked for directions (I always check directions against directions) they asked me politely if I was staying at the Plaza.
I stopped for a sandwich in a health food bar (New York’s frozen yogurt may be the best discovery since hog jowl and peas). The proprietor left the backroom and came out and asked me if I knew Carter personally and what kind of man he is. (I gave him a report only his blood kin could beat). He respectfully sought my opinion on who will be the vice-presidential nominee and I was authoritative as only a V.I.P. can be. Everybody I said, knows it will be [U.S. House Rep. from Texas and the first Black woman to give the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic Convention] Barbara Jordan.
My tag didn’t open the door of the Persian Room at the Plaza for me but it wasn’t its fault. There was nobody there (Miami News columnist John Keasler said later, “There’s a lot of that going around.”)
And now I’ve got to hurry. There’s a hookers’ caucus across the street. I wonder if I’m V.I.P. enough to get into that. I have already got the word from demonstrating “lesbian sisters and gay brothers” to “Live Free — Love Freely.”
Copies of “Celestine Sibley, Reporter” are available for purchase via the website ardmoreavenuepublishing.com
Above image: Jimmy Carter at the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York City. Photo courtesy: Library of Congress.
Richard L. Eldredge is the founder and editor in chief of Eldredge ATL. As a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta magazine, he has covered Atlanta since 1990.
