ATLANTA — For the past 10 years, a New York couple kept a warm tradition baking up and down the East Coast.
Since 2015, psychologist Dr. Caroline Clauss-Ehlers and her husband Julian, who is a professional chef, have baked and delivered pies to the family of former President Jimmy Carter.
The couple told Channel 2′s Tom Jones that the decade-long tradition started after a question by a Channel 2 Action News reporter at a news conference that year.
The psychologist and chef told Jones that they’ve gone through some hurdles when it came to ensuring the pies were delivered. They said it was sometimes an adventure getting the pies through airport security in New York.
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“I got stopped because they thought they were bombs in the suitcase,” Dr. Clauss-Ehlers said.
The husband and wife made creating and baking the pies into a family activity and put a lot of care into making them.
“We went as a family to an orchard and we picked the peaches together,” she said. But it wasn’t always peaches, sometimes it was apple, cherry, even pumpkin.
“We made fresh pumpkin pie, with real pumpkin,” Julian Clauss-Ehlers said.
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Dr. Clauss-Ehlers is an advisor with the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship. She said she would bring the pies to the Carter Center in Atlanta each year for their annual meetings.
“Mrs. Carter one time turned to me at the meeting and said ‘Where’s my pie?’” she said.
For President Carter’s 100th birthday, the couple made a special pie as well, and it was a hit with the family.
“I heard from his grandson, Josh, saying the pie was delivered and devoured, which was lovely,” Dr. Clauss-Ehlers said.
After the former president’s recent death, Dr. Clauss-Ehlers wrote in a blog for Psychology Today about how the tradition started.
“It’s kind of fate that you asked that question,” she said to Jones.
She told Jones that when she and her husband were watching the 2015 news conference where President Carter announced he had cancer, Jones asked about well-wishers and any calls or correspondence that had touched his heart.
The former president said calls from other presidents and dignitaries, as well as those from close friends and what people were doing to help his family were among his favorites.
“Bringing us peach pies and stuff like that,” President Carter said at the 2015 briefing. “That’s what made me feel more emotional.”
Dr. Clauss-Ehlers said that’s what inspired the couple to begin baking pies for the Carter family.
Since the former president’s passing, the Clauss-Ehlers reached out to Carter’s grandson and he said he was open to continuing the tradition.
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