By JANET COOK
News staff writer
June 21, 2007

Atlanta meeting with former president gives new inspiration to HR’s Peter Marbach

Peter Marbach learned a valuable lesson last month: that something you did years ago can come back to enlighten you.

In the case of Marbach, a celebrated Hood River landscape photographer, the culmination of an intriguing journey that began in the 1970s happened last month when he met former President Jimmy Carter in Atlanta. This is the story of how he got there.

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In the early 1990s, Marbach was working as the development director at Unity College in Maine, a small liberal arts school specializing in environmental studies. The school was going through tough financial times and Marbach’s job was to seek fund-raising avenues in order to help the school avoid losing its accreditation.

While trying to come up with creative fund-raising ideas, Marbach saw a magazine article about the solar panels that President Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 during the energy crisis. The panels were part of Carter’s push to get the nation to embrace renewable energy.

After Reagan became president in 1980, his administration removed the solar panels and they had been languishing in a General Services Administration warehouse in Virginia ever since.

“It was upsetting to me,” Marbach recalled about seeing a picture of the perfectly good solar panels — more than 30 of them — collecting dust in a government warehouse. “Then a light bulb went on.” If he could get the panels donated to the college, it would not only put them to good use but be a valuable symbol for Unity: one of the top environmental schools leading by example.

Marbach began making phone calls and writing letters. He also decided to send a letter directly to Carter, whom he’d long admired. To his astonishment, Carter sent back a handwritten reply, which Marbach remembers verbatim.

“It would please me very much to see these panels restored,” Carter wrote. Marbach began including copies of Carter’s response in his correspondence to government agencies. Whether Carter had any behind-the-scenes involvement Marbach doesn’t know, but within six weeks — a nanosecond in government bureaucracy time — the GSA informed him that he could have the panels for a $500 administrative fee.

Marbach immediately removed the seats from the college’s aging blue bus and drove to the GSA warehouse in Franconia, Va. In the cavernous two-story building filled with everything from old computers and office furniture to forgotten artwork taken from defunct or redecorated federal offices, Marbach and a government official found the solar panels and loaded as many as would fit into the bus — 22 panels in all, which weighed 4,000 pounds.

Marbach returned to the college with the former White House solar panels, which were installed on the roof of the school’s main building and used to heat water for the dining room.

Marbach’s coup in getting the panels donated to Unity received widespread media attention on the East Coast, including in the Washington Post.

“It was a very momentous event at the college,” Marbach said. “It allowed us to have a very successful fund-raising campaign.” Marbach continued working for Unity College for a couple of years before he moved to Hood River in the mid-1990s to pursue his photography career.

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Fast forward to fall 2006. Marbach got a phone call from Swiss documentary filmmaker Roman Keller. He was calling from Unity College in Maine, where he and a partner were working on a film about President Carter and his efforts in the 1970s to get the nation to move forward with renewable energy.

The solar panels were a main component of their story, and they wanted Marbach to fly to Maine so they could interview him.

For various reasons, Marbach couldn’t make it but he had a local videographer record an interview of him answering questions the Swiss filmmakers had sent to him.

Marbach thought that was the end of it. But in May, Keller called him again. The filmmakers had an interview scheduled with Carter himself in Atlanta, and wondered if Marbach could come join them.

He took a red-eye and the next day, after spending the morning with the filmmakers, accompanied them to their meeting with Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center, a sprawling complex in downtown Atlanta where Carter and a large staff advance the center’s human rights work around the world.

Marbach sat nearby while the filmmakers interviewed the former president for about 20 minutes.

Afterward Marbach — who has read many of the nearly two dozen books Carter has written — asked the former president if he would sign one of the books he’d brought along for the occasion. Then the photographer presented Carter with one of his own coffee table books — “Mount Hood: The Heart of Oregon.”

Marbach asked President Carter if he could have their picture taken together.

“He said, ‘Let’s stand here,’” Marbach recalled. “And I said, ‘Could we stand over here? The light is better.’” Carter politely obliged.

Marbach said Carter was very friendly and “down-to-earth.”

“At the end, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Thank you so much for the book,’” Marbach said.

That night, Marbach was invited to a dinner at the Swiss Deputy Consular’s residence in Atlanta with the filmmakers and about two dozen staffers from the Carter Center — many of them former officials in the Carter administration.

“It was just a wild evening,” Marbach said. “There were all these brilliant people. It was wild to be treated like I had something important to contribute.”

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After less than 48 hours in Atlanta, Marbach flew home.

“You have an experience like this and then you come back to your life and it’s like it never happened,” he said. Except that for Marbach, the whirlwind trip rekindled something in him that had been dormant for a time.

“This experience with Carter sort of snapped me back to my roots of environmental activism,” said Marbach, who, before becoming a full-time photographer, spent three years on three different treks on the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail and the length of Great Britain as fund-raisers for several nonprofit organizations. “I’m 51 years old. How do I want to use my abilities to be good for the community at large?”

Before he left Atlanta, Marbach got to tour the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, where one of the solar panels he’d rescued from the government warehouse was on display with an explanation of the story behind it, including Marbach’s role.

He was both humbled and inspired by the recognition of his role in an historic event whose story lives on. And it lives on in more ways than one; the former White House solar panels are still in use on the cafeteria roof at Unity College.