CLINTON — The president of the United States was coming to spend the night and Kay Thompson was a nervous wreck. Who wouldn’t be?

She tidied up the handsome Victorian home here, where she and her husband were raising their eight children. She put out cheese and crackers and tried to ignore all those men running around in dark suits with beige earpieces and tiny microphones up their sleeves.

“We’re an average family and we’ll do no more for the president than we would for any other guest,’’ Mrs. Thompson told the Globe just before St. Patrick’s Day nearly 40 years ago.

Then, on March 16, 1977, Jimmy Carter walked up the steps of her house, kissed her on the cheek, and hugged her. An unlikely friendship blossomed.

“She was glad her family was chosen to represent the country, but she was nervous as hell,’’ her son Michael recalled the other day, gathered with his siblings around the table in the kitchen that was once his mother’s domain.

The Thompson home was Carter’s first stop on his “people-to-people’’ campaign, perhaps the biggest event in this town’s history. His earlier address that evening to a packed Town Hall audience made headlines.

His more intimate visit to the Thompsons made memories now pressed in photo albums and preserved in the minds of the family who saw the most powerful man on Earth put his feet up on their coffee table, spread out the morning newspaper, and make his own bed before eating a bacon-and-egg breakfast with them.

“It was like he was a neighbor,’’ Richard Thompson said.

The Thompsons returned to the family homestead this week after Kay Thompson died on Tuesday at 95. They reminisced about the night their parents surrendered their bed to make room for a president.

They remembered the special red phone the White House installed on their parents’ nightstand and how Carter wrote a note for 14-year-old Jane Thompson’s teacher, explaining her tardiness. “Please excuse Jane for being late,’’ Carter wrote. “She had a guest in her home.’’

More than that, the Thompson children remembered a mother whose most chronicled hours may have been those spent with Jimmy Carter. But they weren’t the most important.

Mrs. Thompson graduated from Clinton High School in 1938. She and Edward “Gunner’’ Thompson courted for eight years before they married. A year later, their first child, Billy, was born. Edward Jr., Mary, Hester, Patrick, Michael, Richard, and Jane followed.

She was president of the Clinton Community Chest, secretary of the Lassie League, and a volunteer at a nearby soup kitchen. Why? “She felt she was blessed by God with the ability to feed her eight kids and not have them go to bed hungry,’’ Patrick said.

Mostly, though, she raised and kept an eye on her children.

She never got her driver’s license. “She had eight kids and by the time she got us all dressed and ready it would be time to go home,’’ explained Mary.

Faith, above all, was Kay Thompson’s anchor. When Carter invited the Thompsons to a White House reception in 1979 for Pope John Paul II, she felt blessed. “It is very easy to love your friends, but not to love your enemies,’’ she told the Globe that year. “That’s what I’d ask the pope to pray for.’’

Prayer was her spiritual metronome. She prayed the rosary every afternoon, nearly wearing out those beads when Billy went off to Vietnam in 1967. The family traced his steps through Southeast Asia on a map taped up beside the family telephone.

“She had a phrase,’’ Michael said. “Being a mom or a dad is not a noun. It’s a verb. It’s what you do that makes you a parent.’’

From the Carter Center in Atlanta, the 39th president of the United States — the houseguest who climbed that spiral staircase on Chestnut Street 39 years ago – sent his condolences.

“Rosalynn and I are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Kay Thompson,’’ Jimmy Carter said in a statement. “We remember her hospitality and warmth toward us and her love for our country and its democratic traditions. She will be missed by many, and we share this loss with her family.’’

That family will file into St. John the Evangelist Church here on Saturday, the same church where Kay Thompson walked down the aisle as a bride in 1947.

Her children remember the woman who welcomed the president. They cherish the mother who nurtured the family she prayed for each afternoon.

Thomas Farragher is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at thomas.farragher@globe.com.