Beyond the Run of the Mill

"I thought everybody was smarter than me when I went to college," he says. "And I thought everybody was smarter than me when I walked into a courtroom, and I thought everybody was smarter than me when I went to the Senate."

Like his father before him -- who, near the end of his career, finally became a supervisor at the mill -- he would just work harder to prove himself.

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Robbins never had more than two stoplights, but when a teenage Edwards was driving through the streets, it seemed big enough -- almost.

"My father got me that car -- it was a flood car," he says, recalling how he cleaned out the mud and shined it up. "I thought I was hot stuff in that red Duster. I drove all over Robbins. It didn't take long, but I drove all over Robbins."

Robbins, population 1,000, about 60 miles west of Raleigh, was the last in a string of Southern mill towns that the Edwards family lived in during Wallace's career with Milliken & Co. The mill, which was shuttered in 1990, was the town's main source of jobs. Opened in 1930, it employed, at its peak, more than 1,500 people. But like other towns throughout the South, Robbins lost its textile jobs to overseas competitors practically overnight, and a culture that provided a more secure living than the family farm disappeared forever. In the 1960s and '70s, when Edwards lived in Robbins, no one could imagine that happening.

Young John -- officially "Johnny Reid Edwards" on his birth certificate and still called "Johnny" by his parents -- was 12 when the family moved there. Besides his South Carolina birthplace, it is the town he refers to most often at campaign events.

"In the beginning, it was like a cocoon, it was very nurturing," he says. "I played every high school sport, and as a result, I knew everybody and everybody knew me. And when I left, it was intimidating because I had never spent any time in any town or city of any size."

When Edwards and his high school buddies discussed the future, none of them expressed a longing to escape Robbins, Frye says. There was just a feeling that college was the answer, that a good profession was the key. Mostly, the talk was about "football and basketball and girls," Frye says, though John was sensitive to his parents' circumstances. "I think he was very conscious of how his dad had to work hard to get what education he managed, to try to get ahead to take care of his family."

Wallace and Bobbie Edwards, now retired, still live in Robbins, in a comfortable four-bedroom house they built in 1993. It is not far from the more modest dwelling where they raised John and his two younger siblings, Kathy and Wesley. Campaigning occasionally for their son in Iowa, the parents have won friends with their folksy, down-to-earth manner.

"We would do anything in the world to help Johnny," says Bobbie Edwards, 74, a small, energetic woman who does most of the talking, as her husband smiles beside her.

Wallace and Bobbie both came from towns in the South Carolina foothills where the mills operated day and night. They met at a summer square dance. "He was riding with someone else, so he said, 'If I stay after the dance, I'll walk you home,' " Bobbie recalls. "And I said, 'Am I supposed to be thrilled to death or something?' I was kind of a smart aleck. He started calling me after that and he started coming to see me."