Several years ago, on a dark day of deep despair, a silly idea came to me—one that would eventually become a silly book, while finding me crossing paths with a former President of the United States who was anything but silly.

I was working back then in the entertainment industry, writing film scripts for the major studios, TV networks, and independent producers. My annual income could best be described as boom or bust. Some years I earned very little. In others, I made vastly more money than I could’ve ever begun to imagine at the Los Angeles Times, where I had toiled as a reporter for more than a decade. On balance, it was a comfortable living, one that allowed me to escape Los Angeles with my family and buy a home with an ocean view two hours up the coast in lovely Santa Barbara. But the more time I spent writing movies, the more disillusioned and frustrated I became.

I grew tired of fighting LA traffic and having to attend pitch meetings to propose my movie ideas that more often than not went nowhere; of being jacked around by conniving development executives who professed to love my ideas, then hired other screenwriters to write them; and of seeing my best scripts get rejected outright or rewritten so extensively that by the time they were produced—what few actually made it to the screen–they bore scant resemblance to my original work.

Thus it was while sitting at my desk one afternoon, stewing over my latest misadventure in Hollywood, that the idea hit me:

I need to find another job.

Suddenly, as if guided by some occult hand, I found myself typing up a list of possible employment opportunities, each one more preposterous than the next, but any one of which, I was convinced, would be way more fun than screenwriting. I could become a chair tester for La-Z-Boy, getting paid to sit on my duff all day. Maybe I could shoot hoops for the Harlem Globetrotters, or go be a wine taster for some major vintner (back then) like Ernest and Julio Gallo. I could train whales for Sea World. I could sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The list of dream jobs became virtually endless!

My one big problem, I realized, was that I was uniquely unqualified to take on any of those jobs. But then I thought, Wait a minute. This is America! Since when did a lack of qualifications stop anybody from doing anything?

And so, more for grins than the prospects of actual gainful employment, and just to see what kinds of responses I’d get, I began mailing out dozens of goofy application letters under the nom de plume, “Fred Grimes,” a likeable, somewhat less-than-articulate guy with a can-do, never-say-die attitude who’d unfortunately lost his job “down at the plant”, and was looking to reinvent himself in the Land of Opportunity. The letters spawned replies that ranged from equally goofy to deadly serious.

The head of the Tabernacle Choir pointed out rather stuffily that one had to be a member of the Mormon Church with “considerable training and vocal experience” to join his choir—and that each vocalist was a volunteer. The job, he said, didn’t pay a dime.

Meanwhile, over at Gallo, the head of consumer relations wrote back to report that, “Unfortunately, if we had a job of wine taster, the applicant’s line would indeed be quite long. Sorry!!”

Sea World in San Diego responded with, “Although we were impressed with your resume, we have found other candidates who more closely suit our needs at this time.” Fred had sent no resume; only that he “had a way with animals” after having trained the family cat to do a few tricks.

The Globetrotters, to whom Fred had written admitting that he was just “an average unemployed American who is white”, and who couldn’t play basketball to save his life, but who could “whistle the heck out of Sweet Georgia Brown”, the Globetrotter’s theme song, got the joke. They responded with a friendly thanks but no thanks while urging Fred to, “Keep whistling!”

Then Fred wrote to Jimmy Carter.

“You’re making a big mistake building all those houses for the poor,” he advised the former President. “Sir, why not build houses for the rich? You could call them ‘Jimmy Carter Homes,’ or ‘Homes by Jimmy Carter.’ I bet a lot of rich folks would buy them just to tell their friends, ‘Guess who hung my drywall?’ Fred bragged that he was pretty handy around the house, having recently installed a new kitchen sink, and urged the former President to hire him as his construction foreman.

A couple of weeks later, I ventured outside to the mailbox to find an envelope bearing a return address in Plains, Georgia–the same address I was to discover later where Carter in 1961 had built a modest, ranch-style home while helping run his family’s peanut farm and warehouse business, and where he and his wife, Rosalynn, still resided. Folded inside the envelope was the original letter I had sent him as Fred Grimes. Hand-written on the upper-right corner was a note from Carter himself:

“Fred—Thanks for your idea. When all the poor have homes, we can start on the rich. –Jimmy C.”

That letter, and dozens of others from Fred, along with their responses, would eventually find their way into a modest, nonfiction book–Dear Ernest and Julio, the Ordinary Guy’s Search for the Extraordinary Job, by Fred Grimes, with David Freed. Published by St. Martin’s Press, it’s been out of print for a while, but you can still find used copies for cheap on eBay if you’re at all interested.

Not long after Dear Ernest and Julio was published, my wife and I visited Plains, Georgia. It was an easy drive from Albany, Georgia, where I was born, and not far from Fort Benning, where our then-19-year-old son, who today is a US Army major stationed at the Pentagon, was graduating from Airborne School. I was stunned to discover that Plains was little more than a few old storefronts with a wooden sidewalk out front and a set of railroad tracks out back where they loaded harvested peanuts into hopper cars. The town was so small, West Main Street, the main drag, ran a couple of blocks at most, with businesses occupying only one side of the street. How was it possible, I marveled, that so seemingly inconsequential a place could’ve spawned an American President?

Jimmy Carter, who passed away yesterday at age 100, led a life that was anything but inconsequential. His four years in office may have been marred by the failed rescue attempt he authorized in 1980 to free 52 Americans held hostage in Iran, but history in the end will remember him fondly as a humble, decent leader who genuinely cared for people and did what he could to help them, who built houses for the poor rather than the rich, and who demonstrated at every turn the kind of selflessness and personal integrity sadly found in short supply these days in Washington, D.C.