Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were not only a global power couple but also best friends and life mates

PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — In spring 1955, Rosalynn Carter was doing what she had sworn to avoid when she married an ambitious Naval officer: keeping house and raising children in the same tiny town where they grew up.

Then Jimmy Carter called for help from his family's peanut farming warehouse. The future U.S. president couldn't manage on his own, and they had no money to hire employees. So his wife gathered their sons and went to answer the company phone. Soon she was managing finances and handling customers.

Before long, "I knew more on paper about the business than he did, and he would take my advice about things," Rosalynn Carter told The Associated Press ahead of their 75th anniversary in 2021.

Their marriage was almost a decade old when she went to the warehouse, but that was perhaps the true beginning of a partnership that won the Georgia governor's office in 1970, the White House in 1976 and then propelled the Carters through four decades as global humanitarians. Undergirding that path was a small-town love story that spanned 77 years of marriage and two decades of family friendships before that.