It’s been nearly half a century since a little-known Georgia peanut farmer hoisted a nine-year-old girl and her kid sister into the air at a South Shore church and gave them each a kiss on the cheek before introducing himself to Chicago.

“Hello everyone, my name is Jimmy Carter" Kimberly Ray can still hear the Democratic presidential candidate saying at that April 1976 campaign event.

“Although I was a little girl, I still remember the sound,” Kimberly Ray told the Sun-Times. “Just the electricity in the air. … I remember the palpable joy and expectation in the room. There was just this amazing feeling, it was riveting.”

Carter's death on Dec. 29 “brought it all back” — a flurry of happy memories of her family and the moment of a lifetime, Kimberly Ray said.

And with Thursday’s funeral of the 39th U.S. president, Ray is one of many Chicagoans now reflecting on how they crossed paths with Carter as a presidential candidate or later when he helped to construct homes with Habitat for Humanity in West Garfield Park.

For Ray that path started with a dream her mother had.

Angie Ray dreamt of a farmer becoming president, and after researching the candidates for the upcoming election — shortly before Carter won the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses — she picked Carter.

But it wasn't just a vision that drew her to the future president: the two had similar beliefs about education and faith.

“She just felt like he had character and there was just something special about him,” Kimberly Ray, now senior pastor of Angie Ray Ministries Church on the Rock in Matteson, told the Sun-Times.

Soon after, Angie Ray began reaching out to the Carter campaign and bringing her children along to get the word out about the peanut farmer turned presidential contender. Angie Ray and her four daughters would hand out bags of peanuts with “Vote for Jimmy Carter” written on them.

She eventually arranged a visit for him at Monument of Faith Church at 7359 S. Chappel Ave. in April 1976.

Carter later appointed Angie Ray as the campaign's Midwest coordinator of minority affairs and as an at-large delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

He visited Chicago several times in the months leading up to his election, attending a July fundraiser with Mayor Richard J. Daley and stopping in at the 1976 Illinois Democratic Convention in September.

Carter would come back to walk in the city's Columbus Day Parade alongside Daley and to speak at the Niles Township Jewish Congregation in October, then again in December to attend Daley’s funeral.

But the passion of his Chicago supporters wasn't enough. Carter won the presidency in 1976, but lost Illinois to incumbent President Gerald Ford. Four years later, he lost the state again again, losing his reelection bid to Republican Ronald Reagan, who was born in Tampico, Illinois.

Of course, that 1980 defeat did not end Carter’s legacy. As the nation’s longest living former president, Carter developed a reputation for his humanitarian efforts.

“I know my mother would have been so proud of him,” Kimberly Ray said of Carter's work since Angie Ray's death in 2005. “His body of work is not just being an amazing president, but genuinely caring about people."

Habitat for Humanity’s legacy in Chicago

Less than a decade after losing the White House, Carter returned to Chicago, this time to bring attention to a Habitat for Humanity project. The home-building organization was founded a decade earlier, and the former president's involvement raised its profile, said Jennifer Parks, executive director of Habitat Chicago.

“We got a huge push in awareness when President Carter joined us,” Parks said. “He helped put us on the map as an organization.”

During the trip, he stayed at the Guyon Hotel in West Garfield Park. The 289-room, 169-unit luxury residential hotel was built in 1928 and was once home to several radio stations, a no-jazz dance floor and Al Capone associate Jack McGurn before falling on hard times.

On the weekend of July 11, 1986, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, "stayed overnight in a roach-infested room, furnished with only a couch and a milk crate,” Crain’s reported at the time.

That weekend, a pair of two-bedroom homes and a pair of five-bedroom homes were built on empty lots at North Kildare and West Maypole Avenues, nicknamed the "Miracle on Maypole.” At the time, Habitat homebuyers were offered no-interest mortgages in the amount of whatever labor and material costs weren't volunteered, or close to $25,000 for the two-bedroom homes — $72,000 in 2025 dollars.

Carter told the Sun-Times in 1986 that one of the families had been living without heat, electricity or running water and was paying $400 monthly — $1,100 today — for an apartment where rats crawled into the children's beds.

"That ought not to be in the richest nation on Earth," Carter said. "It's our responsibility to see that people have food to eat, clothes to wear and a place to sleep. I don't think that's too much."

A few of the homes Carter helped build in the 4200 block of West Maypole Avenue became derelict and were demolished in 2010, according to city building records. Parks said it was projects such as this that led to Habitat for Humanity changing the way it operates to try to ensure longer-term commitments to the areas where homes are built.

“Just because the Carter project did not have a successful legacy in Chicago doesn’t mean it hasn’t had a successful legacy overall,” Parks said. “[Now,] we do not walk away. It takes years to build trust and healthy neighborhoods. … We make sure we’re building for the distance because our neighbors deserve it.”

• I'm a Gen X woman with a name beloved by baby boomers, but often misunderstood by my peers.
• Today the name Linda is often associated with a frumpy archetype, as seen in TV shows and memes.
• The unique "y" in the spelling of my name helps me stand out from the Lindas of the world.

"Linda? That's my aunt's name!"

I probably wasn't even out of my teens before I'd lost count of the number of times a cute boy said this to me. "You have an old name because you had old parents," my older sister flatly told me once. My friends more tactfully insisted that "No, the 'y' makes it a totally different name!"

But my sister wasn't wrong: I'm a Gen X Lynda with a name beloved by the parents of baby boomers and even the silent generation. These days, the name has been reduced to a frumpy archetype. How did a name that was the equivalent of a TikTok sensation of its day become so relentlessly uncool?

Lindas are getting a bad rap

The "y" is the only thing standing between me and the Lindas of the world. As a Linda, I'm an episode-long joke on "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" in which everyone is confounded by a baby named Linda because Lindas are adult women who work in HR. There's also the bossy busybody of the "Listen Linda" meme (there but for the grace of Karen go I), which originated with a Linda recording her three-year-old son repeatedly insisting "Listen, Linda" with all of the exasperated patience he can muster faced with the implacable bureaucracy that a Linda embodies. As a Lynda, I have plausible deniability.

The comedic success of both the TV show and the meme relies on the confidence that we've all noticed certain things about people named Linda and that we'll all get the joke, and we do.

"Who's Linda? Your mom's friend?" Linda is the type of person who carries SlimFast in her purse and gets mad when she can't find her keys. Linda says things like "Mondays," with that little rueful head shake, you know the one. Of course she does. And Linda's meddling opinions likely need to be shut down: Listen, Linda.

We all know this Linda, but why? How did this extraordinarily popular name become this frumpy archetype?

The name isn't poised for a comeback — yet

One thing all the characters in the Kimmy Schmidt episode agree on — including the five middle-aged Lindas who all work in HR at the same company — Linda definitely can't be a baby.

These days, they aren't wrong. In the US, the name Linda began its sharp rise in popularity in the late 1930s, peaked in the late 1940s, and declined dramatically throughout the 1960s and 1970s to become one of the unlikeliest names given to babies today.

This is my name, and I'm keeping it

Of course, we Lyndas with a "y" were always somewhat rare, which is why I've always side-eyed HR departments, try not to make everything my business, and can solemnly swear not a sip of SlimFast has ever passed my lips. I do get mad when I can't find my keys though.

I try not to think much about the fact that I was almost an Elizabeth as I'm convinced my life would have taken a completely different trajectory. Elizabeth surely would have been several inches taller than my five-foot-one-inch frame and would probably have had a decent sense of direction. She'd have published a novel in her twenties and probably landed on one of those "30 Under 30" lists.

However unenamoured I have always been of my name, I've also never considered changing it. Wouldn't that just leave me with another name I'd also get tired of, only I'd have no one but myself to blame?

There's another reason I'm kind of attached to Lynda though. My father loved the name and had always wanted a daughter named Linda. My mother suggested the "y" addition just so it would be a little different. The name meant something to them even if it seems slightly ridiculous to me. Now that they're both gone, it feels like a lasting thread of connection with them both.

That and the fact that it's Lynda with a "y." I'm not one of those Lindas other people talk about — at least not as long as I can find my keys.