On his parents' farm near Plains, Jimmy Carter grew up in a small, enclosed world where he learned the habits and responsibilities that later carried him to world leadership. In the sun-baked fields and weathered buildings, he worked hard, played fair, and shouldered responsibility, while his parents, "Mr. Earl" and "Miss Lillian," raised four children to value education, community service, their Christian faith, and each other. After high school, he left the farm intending to spend his life as a naval officer. Just after his graduation, Ensign Carter married Rosalynn Smith, his sister Ruth's close friend, and when they left their hometown for Norfolk and the Navy, neither expected to return to Plains seven years later. After his father died of cancer in 1953, Jimmy Carter came back to his Georgia roots, though not to this home of his boyhood.