Jimmy Carter was born on October 1, 1924 at Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Georgia. He was the first American president to be born in a hospital. World War I had ended a few years before Carter’s birth, Prohibition was the law of the land, and life expectancy for American men was 58 years. As Carter turns 100 this morning — the first former president to do so — here’s what, according to the WashingtonPost archives, which took place around DC at the time of his birth.

It was an election year

A hitherto ‘listless campaign’ began to heat up, the After reported. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican who took office the year before Warren Harding’s death, faced Democratic challenger John W. Davis and Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette. Democrats, the After reported, were hoping the race would end evenly because they believed Congress would anoint Davis. Rates were a big topic of the day; the Democrats wanted to lower them. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Smith W. Brookhart of Iowa called on Republican Party vice presidential candidate Charles G. Dawes to drop out of the race. He complained in a letter to the national party that the Ohioan “started out as a brutal ‘plutogog,’ but his rudeness and impolite language reduced him, in his own vocabulary, to a mere ‘puddle-white plutogog.’ The Republican Club of Arlington – yes, that’s right – announced a meeting in Cherrydale with the stirring slogan “Coolidge of chaos.”

The Nats were in the World Series

The Washington Nationals were scheduled to take on the New York Giants in a few days. Seats at Griffith Stadium were hard to come by: “Hundreds of ticket requests continued to reach the ball club office yesterday,” says the After reported. Many people from Coffeyville, Kansas, planned to make the trip to Washington to see hometown hero Walter Johnson pitch. Saks & Co. donated shoes to the players; the Raleigh Haberdashers announced they would provide hats. “All of Washington, most of Maryland, Virginia and other parts of the South want to see the Nationals take on the Giants,” baseball Commissioner Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis told the newspaper. The Nats ended their regular season play with a comical 13-1 loss to the Boston Red Sox. The scandal struck on October 1: Landis banned a Giants player and coach from the series after it emerged that they had unsuccessfully tried to bribe an opposing player from the Philadelphia Phillies to play a game during the championship series.

Local news

• Three Montgomery County police officers were suspended after handcuffing a suspect to an iron pipe and beating him with a rubber hose.

• Naval Academy Midshipman Edward J. Triebe was expelled after trying to smuggle “30 gallons of liquor” aboard the battleship New York while visiting Gibraltar.

• Elizabeth Hummer entered the Franklin School and was “greeted with floral tributes.”

• The After noted that the insurance policy she offered readers—a $2,500 accident policy—cost only $1.50 a year, “so insignificant an amount.”

The lifestyle pages

• Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments caused “queues that stretched along E Street in the afternoon and the length of the long block at night” near the National Theater, where it was playing. “At each of the performances so far, there has been loud applause for the spectacular scenes,” the paper reported, “much like the great bursts of clapping that come from favorite flesh-and-blood stars.”

• Liquor in the Mexican town of “Tia Juana” could not be trusted, the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, up north, Canada hoped to strike a deal with the U.S. that would allow it to ship liquor through Alaska in exchange for betraying Americans who bought large quantities of liquor north of the border.

• Martin Weber of 922 K Street, Northeast, filed for a limited divorce from his wife, Mary E. Weber of the Department of Labor, who he alleged “stripped their home of all furnishings” when she left for “a place unknown to him. ” He asked the court for his furniture back.

• The day after Carter was born, the newspaper offered advice to older people — people ages 45 to 64 — who worried they would collapse if they continued to work after being diagnosed with heart disease. “In fact, very few people with heart disease die,” Dr. advised. W. A. ​​Evans.

Senior editor

Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He previously worked at the Poynter Institute, TBD.com and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.