Edwards’ accent is upcountry Carolina. His ancestors came from Georgia and the hills of South Carolina. Like thousands of other Southerners in the early 20th century, they were sharecroppers who left the farms to work in the textile mills, where there at least was a steady paycheck.
His maternal grandparents worked in a cotton mill in Utica, a mill village on the outskirts of Seneca, about 10 miles from Clemson University. His father’s people were more upwardly mobile. Edwards’ grandfather ran a small furniture store and served on the town council of nearby Walhalla.
Edwards’ parents, Wallace Edwards and Bobbie Wade, were both working in the mill when they met at a square dance at a nearby state park. They married in 1952 and settled into a three-room rental in Utica Mill Village.
Edwards’ first home may be the perfect campaign prop in his quest for the presidency — the modern equivalent of the log cabin. Earlier this summer, Edwards and his parents stood outside the mill village house and took questions from reporters.
“We didn’t know any better than this was good,” said Wallace Edwards. “We had the basics, food and clothes.”
Their first child, Johnny, was born in 1953, his father taking out a $50 bank loan to pay the hospital bill. Six months later, Bobbie was back at work folding sheets on the night shift at J.P. Stevens. Wallace, who worked the day shift, took care of their son in the evenings.
They lived briefly in a public housing project, but things soon got better for the young family.
Wallace spent most of his career with Milliken & Co., a huge textile operation based in Spartanburg. He was transferred from town to town in the textile belt as he got increasingly better jobs in the industrial engineering department. He took his family to Union, S.C., Rutherfordton, N.C., Clemson, S.C., back to Seneca, and then to Thompson, Ga.
John Edwards says his South Carolina neighborhoods were pretty rough. When he was about 8, his father and an older cousin, Tim Addis, taught him how to battle bullies.
“You wait until they get close to you and then you hit them as hard as you can right in the nose,” Edwards said, laughing. “And they were right; it worked. You punch somebody in the nose, and they will back off, every single time.”
By the time Wallace Edwards brought the family to Robbins in 1965, he was a department head and soon would become production manager of the local Milliken plant.
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The Edwardses were solidly middle class. For most of the time in Robbins, they lived on leafy Frye Street. Their neighbors included an insurance agent, a teacher, a lawyer and a truck driver. An optometrist now lives in the house where Edwards spent the longest period of his childhood.
His father eventually left Milliken, frustrated that he could not advance further in the company because he had not attended college. He set up his own consulting firm advising textile companies.
His mother held a series of jobs, including starting a small roadside antiques store where she bought furniture, refinished it and sold it to help put her son through college. She worked for the county board of elections. She took her last job, as a rural letter carrier in West End, to provide her family with health insurance.
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Edwards’ college days were a time of great turmoil and social unrest. At NCSU, students organized antiwar marches and held “Dump Nixon” signs. The country was bitterly divided over the Watergate scandal.
But Edwards — focused on his studies, sports and girlfriends — seems to have floated above the political and cultural wars. Many young men at NCSU sported long hair and beards. But pictures of Edwards show him cleanshaven at NCSU and sporting a neat mustache and longish hair at Carolina. Edwards never served in the armed forces; the draft was abolished in 1973, when he was still in college.
Edwards acknowledges that he tried marijuana “not frequently [but] more than once” while in Raleigh and Chapel Hill. He said he had not used marijuana since leaving school.
His parents were lifelong Republicans, in part because of the corporate culture of the company headed by Roger Milliken, a major GOP donor who encouraged his executives and managers to become Republicans.
“John and I used to debate the Nixon-McGovern election,” said Garner, his NCSU roommate. “I kind of went in the direction of protesting the war. John was more firmly seated in supporting our government. Part of that was the influence of his father.”
Garner remembers that Edwards was undecided about whether to vote in 1972 for President Richard Nixon or whether to vote for the Democratic challenger, Sen. George McGovern.
Edwards says he does not remember how he voted. But he says he might have first registered as an independent. He says he thinks he changed his registration to Democrat by 1976.
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It was Johnny Reid Edwards, however, who changed his name, although not legally. In law school, he started referring to himself as John. He believed that sounded better for his new career.
