They're not flashy or sexy. They don't have any good scandal to gossip about (oh there was Billy, but come on!). He's not ruggedly handsome and she's not a fashionplate. He just turned 80, and she's close. He didn't have the most glamorous presidency, but here's just a little list of what he accomplished just in this past year:

In February, traveled to Ghana, Togo and Mali to help eradicate Guinea worm. In June spent week in rural Alabama and Georgia with Habitat for Humanity, an annual tradition. In July, joined Carter Center staff in Indonesia to monitor first round of elections. In May and August traveled to Venezuela for more election monitoring. In August spoke at the national convention in Boston. And throughout the year continues to teach Sunday school in Plains and lecture once a month at Emory University. He published his 19th book, "Sharing Good Times" and is working on a sequel. And he continued with hobbies that include woodworking and oil painting. And let's not forget he won the Nobel Peace Prize just two years ago.

As for Rosalynn, this woman has been hard at work since her father died of leukemia when she was 13 and she helped raise the rest of her family.

She married Jimmy 58 years ago and produced 3 sons and daughter Amy. She helped him run the family peanut-farming business, backed him in his candidacies, and conceived a lifelong dedication to fighting the stigma of mental illness and improving mental health care. Also found time to work for senior citizens, women, equal rights amendment, refugees in Cambodia, helped found the Carter Center that works to advance peace and health worldwide, has traveled with him on his peace negotiations in Bosnia, Sudan, Ethiopia, and North Korea, has published four books, and became only the third first lady named to the National Women's Hall of Fame (joining Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt). AND THE LIST GOES ON.

No, they're not sexy and they don't start wars. They're just plain good people and they do peace, thank you very much.

As the first volume of Dylan's long-awaited 3-part memoirs, Chronicles, Volume One, hits the stands, it's time for everybody to remember the first time they heard the tiny troubador from Hibbing, Minnesota who changed the landscape of music in the early '60's. I was in a commune in Pacific Grove, California when Dylan played the first Monterey Folk Festival right next door in 1963 and though I didn't go to the festival his first album was played nonstop, full-blast for days where I lived. And then it seemed like the hippest thing ever that Dylan and Joan Baez would have a romance. What can I say, the voice is unique, the lyrics powerful (he says he doesn't like the word "poet"), and the persona mystical. I like that he's kept his life so private - not because private is important for everyone but because it is for him. And yet, like everyone who felt Dylan belonged to our generation, I can't wait to read whatever he's been willing to share about it. The kids of today listen to somebody else, but then most of them don't vote either. In those days we had Dylan to sing out about the war, along with others of that time. Who is singing out today? I grew up alongside him - and so Bobbie Zimmerman, Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You.

She's 67 now and I've been following her journey with admiration for some 40 years. Besides speaking up against the war in Vietnam and taking never-ending flak for it, she also married Tom Hayden and supported his career financially, and for her third choice in husbands (first was Roger Vadim - French director) took on Ted Turner, liberal media mogul. She has never been afraid to contend, but while she was at it she just managed to win 6 Golden Globes, 2 Academy Awards (one for Coming Home - now there was an anti-war movie to die for), and an Emmy. From a famous film family and a Vassar graduate, she was also flexible, becoming an exercise icon in the early '80's and starting the video fitness craze. And all the way along, she looked Fabulous. I hear she's become a born-again Christian (details of which should be fascinating). I'm afraid I can't follow her there, but she will be a forever role model among my peers for her moxie and take-it-on-the-chin integrity

There being no depiction of this woman anywhere on the web that I could find, I've posted the map of her famous journey. If you think we're having a stressful time of it in 2004, consider her story:

She was born in 1732 in Philadelphia but moved to Draper's Meadow in Virginia where in 1750 she married William Ingles. They were the first white couple married west of the Allegheny Mountains. Five years later, in a November snow during the French and Indian War, two farmers heard a faint voice calling. It was Mary, virtually naked, white-haired, teeth gone, and only 23 years old. She had just walked 800 miles (including backtracking) in 42 days to reach home. What happened in the preceding five months was that Shawnee Indians attacked the settlement where Mary and William lived, capturing Mary and her two sons, George and Tommy. Her husband was in the field without weapons and could only look for them after they were gone. Because of her courageous and calm demeanor on the trail, she and her children were allowed to live. Over the month of the journey, Mary tied knots in a string to count the days and marked that they followed rivers. At the Indian village Mary made blankets and shirts for the Indians and French trappers in exchange for keeping blankets for her sons who eventually were sold away from her. She was moved again another 150 miles further away from home and became the first white woman to enter Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. From here she finally escaped with a German/Dutch woman who had also been captured. With two blankets and a single tomohawk they walked into the woods. Twice, half-mad from hunger, the older Dutch woman tried to kill and eat Mary. When Mary reached home finally, she had to send help back for her. Mary Ingles lived another 60 years, during which time she bore four more children and was able to ransom her son Tommy back after 15 years with the Indians, George having died in captivity. She and William continued to contribute to their community. William was a Colonel in the Revolution. They narrowly escaped another massacre. Their son Thomas followed the frontier westward and his own family was attacked by Indians in 1781 with the loss of 2 of his children and his wife. Mary continued to live in the windowless log home shown in the photo until her death because she felt safer there. Her story has been the subject of the books, Follow the River and Shawnee Captive, as well as a made-for-television movie, "The Long Way Home."

We say life was simpler then, and I wonder....

For the second week in a row, I'm including a map, this time of one of the most brilliant military retreats in American history, that of 700 (only 200 of whom were warriors) Native Americans pursued by 2000 U.S. soldiers for 1400 miles, as they attempted to reach the tiny reservation in Idaho that was all that was left of a former reservation that had stretched from Oregon into Idaho. Joseph's father had been a convert to Christianity and supported peace with the whites until 1863 when the federal government took back almost 6 million acres of the Nez Perce reservation he had helped set up. Then he denounced the U.S., destroyed his American flag and Bible, and refused to move his band from the Wallowa Valley or sign a treaty to make the new reservation legal. Seven years later, when he died and Joseph became the tribe's leader, he continued to resist until 1877 when he finally began to lead his people toward Idaho. Because a few young warriors staged a raid on nearby settlements in their rage at this turn of events, the army began to pursue them. Over the long march, the Nez Perce fought with courage and skill in four major battles and numerous skirmishes. Finally in October of that year, Joseph formally surrendered with this famous speech:

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, "Yes" or "No." He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

Even after surrender, Joseph and his people were never allowed to return home to the Wallowa Valley. Chief Joseph died in 1904, still in exile from his homeland, according to his doctor "of a broken heart." Today our weapons are bigger than rifles, spears, and bow and arrow but apparently we are not sick enough yet of killing and dying. How many more years before enough of us will "fight no more forever?"

First of all, I've been meaning to mention that I'm having such a good time doing this series because I'm learning a lot about people already familiar to me and some I've never heard of before. It's kind of like being back in school and not having to be graded. When I was deciding on the person(s) for today, I was actually going to go with Bernard Kouchner, the French humanitarian who co-founded Doctors Without Borders among many other things until I discovered he agreed with starting the war in Iraq. I also considered Jack Kerouac, but I've mentioned him already in past blogs, or Garrison Keillor whose radio show always cheers me up when I happen upon it while driving around on Sundays. But I chose Keller and King because they had something fascinating in common. The lives of both these famous Americans were shaped by the very nature of their being - one born African-American in a country unfortunately still suffering the disease of racism today, the other left blind and deaf by an illness before she was two years old. In spite of being in this world with the deck significantly stacked against them, they rose to the occasion. Helen Keller was born in 1880 in a small Alabama community to parents who had supported the Confederacy. She was blessed by acquiring a teacher who taught her to read, write and speak, but then took that gift and went on to graduate with honors from Radcliffe College and receive degrees from Harvard and other universities. She lectured throughout the world and served on councils and foundations for the blind and deaf, and sometimes for causes like socialism and women's rights. She also wrote an autobiography, The Story of My Life, and several other books that gave hope and inspiration to many. When she was already 49 years old, another Southerner was born in Atlanta, Georgia, his father and grandfather both Christian ministers. Like Helen Keller, his name is a household word today, as he took the circumstances of his life and turned them into a fight for social justice and civil rights that eventually led to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Four years later, on April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed while in Tennessee to support a strike of black garbage men. He was 39 years old. Two months after his death and many miles away in Connecticut, at the age of 88, Helen Keller also left her legacy behind. For both of them, the words on King's tombstone ring out, "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last."

John Lennon was born in Liverpool in 1940 and raised by his aunt and uncle. We all know the story by now, how he met Paul McCartney and together they brought the Beatles to the world. We know he eventually met Yoko Ono and began to perform with her and on his own. We know that in 1979 he had a very bad year when she threw him out to get drugs, sex and other women out of his system and that in 1980 he returned to her, having kicked heroin cold turkey, and cut his final album Double Fantasy to critical acclaim. In 1949, Annie Leibowitz was born in Connecticut to an air force officer and modern dance instructor parents. A product of the San Francisco Art Institute, she got her big break in 1970 with a shot of Allen Ginsberg smoking dope on a peace march that she sold to Rolling Stone magazine for $25. Three years later she became the magazine's chief photographer. Her expertise was celebrities, especially rock musicians. On the afternoon of December 8, 1980, she produced this famous shot of John and Yoko in their hotel room in New York City. By that evening Lennon would be dead. Today Annie Leibowitz works out of a converted garage on Manhattan's West Side with as many as 30 assistants. In 1983, she left Rolling Stone for another trendy radical magazine, Vanity Fair, where she has been ever since turning out her very personal, stylized photos of famous people. John Lennon's death was traumatizing to all of us who admired him for his outrageous, in-your-face activism and his incredible talent. On that afternoon in December 1980 Annie Leibowitz captured for us the essence of his capacity for love. (Other famous photos by Leibowitz)