ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 16, 1997 TAG: 9703170115
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
SOURCE: RICK HAMPSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jimmy Carter's nephew, Willie, was perpetually in trouble, and in jail. But his other side occasionally poked through, revealing he wasn't indifferent to the pain and loneliness his way of life had created.
It was just before dawn when Francisco Noyola saw the thin man staggering up Market Street. Despite the chill, he was trying to sell his leather jacket for $5. He said he'd been drinking all night, and he wanted to keep going.
They pooled their change, split a half-pint of vodka and headed to Noyola's place. The thin man was tired. He had AIDS - dirty needles, he explained.
``I felt comfortable with him,'' Noyola recalls. ``He said that his name was William.''
He did not say that his middle name was Carter, that he was raised in Plains, Ga., or that his uncle was the 39th president of the United States.
The thin man was William Carter Spann, a tragic footnote to Jimmy Carter's presidency. By age 30, he'd been arrested so often his mother stopped counting; he spent two-thirds of the next 20 years in prison for everything from armed robbery to drunken driving.
He called himself The Bad Peanut.
``My uncle's in the White House,'' he said on Inauguration Day 1977, ``and I'm in the big house.'' He made the most of it, selling articles to Hustler and Good Housekeeping and firing off pithy jailhouse observations on the American scene.
When he got married in prison, The Washington Post wrote a big story. When he got out, a limousine picked him up at the gate.
In prison or out, Willie Spann was perpetually turning over a new leaf. He seemed to believe his vows until he broke them; incredibly, given his record, others did too, including Uncle Jimmy.
The nephew always had hope: If he could just get into this detox facility, or that training program
Or just lie down. That's what he wanted now, Feb. 2, on his way home with Francisco Noyola. He tried to stretch out on a bus stop bench, but his companion would not let him. He had the feeling William might not get up.
Noyola mixed them some cocktails when they got to his house and steered his guest to a hammock strung between two trees in front.
His skin was pale and his eyes seemed to be clouding over. ``Don't worry,'' he said, ``I'm just tired. Tomorrow, I'll get my check, and we'll keep the party going.''' Then he closed his eyes. He was still smiling.
``There was nothing about me,'' the son of Jimmy Carter's sister, Gloria, once said of Plains' first family, ``that was like them.''
He was born in 1946 on an Air Force base in Texas. His father was ``Soapy'' Hardy, a former soda jerk who looked good in the uniform he wore home from the war; his mother was Gloria Carter, whose affluent, prominent family did not approve of their impulsive union.
It did not survive Soapy's drinking. Gloria and her son, whom she called Toady, retreated to Plains in 1949. Four years later she married a local farmer, Walter Spann.
By the time he was 11, Toady was smoking and drinking and running away. He got drunk and stole his Uncle Billy's car. He broke into a store. He was expelled in the seventh grade.
Toady created almost unbearable embarrassment for a mother who had had enough already.
Finally, his Uncle Jimmy, who had taught him in Sunday school and persuaded him to get baptized, took him in.
``When Jimmy says grace, he gives a sermon,'' his nephew recalled. ``I'd sit there and be hungry. When there were prayer meetings, I'd go out behind the house and smoke cigarettes.'' Jimmy just didn't understand.
By 1969, he had washed up in Los Angeles, where he was imprisoned for stealing a car. When his uncle was elected governor of Georgia, he recalled, ``I was in the hole.''
Next, he headed to San Francisco, where people called him Willie. ``I was a 24-hour-a-day speed freak, heroin addict, armed robber, burglar, pimp, dealer - and escort to old people, so they could leave their hotel rooms without being mugged. Life was like nothing else I can explain.''
In 1976, as his uncle was winning Democratic primaries, he was pleading guilty to robbing two rooming house employees. Gloria got an anonymous phone call in Plains: ``If you don't send money, I will let the world know that Jimmy Carter's nephew is in jail.''
The story broke during the convention. Reporters found Willie in protective custody at Soledad.
Jimmy Carter said his nephew had been ``in constant trouble all his adult life.'' He didn't denounce him, however, or seem embarrassed. ``You are part of our family,'' he assured him in a note.
Willie cashed in on his celebrity, and settled some scores in the process. In an article for Hustler, he described Gloria as a neurotic, indifferent parent; he said his adoptive father had threatened to kill him; he called his uncle Billy Carter ``a red-necked bigot and bona fide fool.''
Uncle Jimmy, who had tried to help him, was ``a phony,'' whose ``Christianity has never extended to his pocketbook.''
Even before the piece appeared, Willie wrote Carter to apologize: ``There is no excuse for my part in the article. At the time, I was confused, angry, broke and frustrated.''
Today, Carter says he wasn't hurt: ``We always liked Willie. He would go through cycles; there were times when he was a charming and attractive young man, and times when he was fearsome. But he always hoped to do better.''
Life followed a chaotic rhythm: He was married upon his 1979 release from jail; imprisoned for battering his wife; divorced; married again; arrested for drunk driving, and urinalysis showed amphetamines; he went back to jail, where he was caught using Valium; he escaped from jail, calling in hours later to explain he wanted to visit his pregnant wife.
When his son Drew was born a few months later, Willie was in jail.
In 1990, Gloria Carter Spann died of cancer; she had not seen Toady since he left Plains 21 years earlier.
Willie turned more and more to the relative who never gave up on him, the uncle he'd once called ``too square and too cold.''
Jimmy Carter sent his nephew clothes, helped him find places to stay, paid for his methadone. When Carter was in the Bay Area, he'd track Willie down through a parole officer and arrange a visit. He also reached out to Drew, who lived with his mother. Carter always remembered his birthday.
By the beginning of last year, AIDS had wasted Willie from 172 to 125 pounds. When he was released from prison in March, he discovered the San Francisco Cannabis Club, where AIDS patients with medical permission could buy marijuana.
Willie would smoke cheap Mexican pot in the club's cafe, saying how it had helped him kick heroin and booze. He had joined a program to help other AIDS patients. But Dennis Peron, the club's founder, remembers the man's loneliness: ``When he hugged you, he didn't want to let go.''
On Dec. 16, after a record nine months of no violations, the California Department of Corrections finally discharged William Carter Spann from parole. He was 50 years old.
Six weeks later, he stood in the predawn chill, trying to turn his jacket into a drink.
Francisco Noyola had gone inside the house for something to eat when he heard screaming outside.
``THAT MAN IS DEAD!''
The coroner notified Jimmy Carter. Since leaving office, he had negotiated peace in Haiti, brokered fair elections in Nicaragua. But he could not save his nephew from himself.
The autopsy found a toxic level of alcohol, but no drugs. Drew's mother had the body cremated; even in death, The Bad Peanut did not go back to Plains.
LENGTH: Long : 141 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS File, July 1976. When his uncle wasby CNBelected president in 1976, William Carter Spann, the self-described
Bad Peanut, was in Soledad prison.