I was in grade school then, and living in farm country. I remembered watching TV when Nixon resigned, it was the same exact thing on every channel at the same time. Same camera angle, same speech, same guy. At the time I didn't really understand the controversy, but it made sense that the Vice President would take over, which he did.

Saturday Night live would come on, and Chevy Chase made a lot of hay over Ford stumbling on a stage. Apart from that, things were unremarkable, except that assassination attempts were on the news from time to time.

When it came time for our third grade class to do an "advisory vote", everyone went Carter because he was a farmer and Christian, and we were in Christian farm country. Grandpa didn't like Democrats, so I was the only kid to go Ford.

By 1978, they were done with Carter, and were talking about tearing up lawns all over Washington DC with a tractor convoy. Same thing, talk of those high interest farm loans and controlled prices on farm products which put farmers under, and the FFA was talking about how the family farm would probably be obsolete while agribusiness was the future.

A close friend of the family rented some of the grandparents acreage and his kids were like step family to me, (although mostly bad step family), they got involved with this guy named Dick Garno who did shit like what Jones did to Strat, but on a bigger scale and a lot worse. Got him all invested and wrapped up in a hybrid seed grain operation then went campaigning against him in the churches and with law enforcement, saying he was just sure old Gene was going to rip him off so this guy Garno got permission from most of the people old Gene rented land from so he could go and harvest the crop that Gene planted. Real crooked stuff, basically stole the crop by making a side deal with the landowners to harvest on contract and then saying old Gene was going to go sell the grain elsewhere and violate that patent stuff because it was seed grain. It about ruined old Gene.

Those farmers who hadn't even graduated high school were easy pickings for the bullshit hustlers and con artists that worked the farm country of the 1970s.