Beyond the Run of the Mill

Good grades in school came easily enough. Other lessons were provided as needed. When he was just 6 or 7, John was having problems with some neighborhood bullies, and he still remembers his father's advice: "He always said, 'Don't go looking for a fight, but don't run away from a fight,' " Edwards says. "And he said, 'If you do have to hit somebody, make sure you hit him right in the nose.' "

By the time the Edwardses moved to Robbins, around 1965, John was a fierce competitor, on the playing fields and off. He and Frye and the other boys on his block -- one grew up to be the town doctor, another the town dentist -- called themselves "The Frye Street Gang." They spent many hours playing ball and a version of nighttime hide-and-seek they called "The Spotlight Army."

Bobbie learned early on "not to underestimate Johnny" when it came to any form of competition. She recalls a tennis tournament, where he was losing badly. Leaving before the match was over to pick up his sister, she dreaded asking him later how it had gone. "He said, 'Oh, I won,' " she says.

Decades later, the candidate remembers the episode well: "I believe that was the finals of the Robbins tennis tournament," he says. "I was way behind. I kept at it, and kept at it, and the guy finally cracked and I won.

"Determined. I was always very determined."

Paul McLendon, a coach and teacher at North Moore High School, saw the student-athlete in two different arenas. On the football field, where he played defensive back, Edwards was "not large, but he had a lot of tenacity."

"He was a very good defensive player -- he used his head," says McLendon, 75. "Defensive back is the hardest position on the field to play, because you're responding to the receivers coming out."

During Edwards's senior year, McLendon also taught him political science and economics. The class, limited to college-bound students, often erupted into spirited debates about race relations and other current events. John was always in the thick of the arguments.

"I recall calling him up to my desk one day after a very lively discussion. I asked him if he had ever thought about going to law school," McLendon says. "I thought he had a good analytical mind, and he could parse an issue as well as anybody. . . . He said, 'My daddy wants me to go into textiles.' "

The Edwardses always assumed that John would go to college, because he was so bright and ambitious. But they say they never pressured him. They didn't have to. In fact, he says, he was on his own when it came to filling out applications, seeking financial aid and choosing classes; his parents didn't think they could offer much assistance. But money was a concern, and his father wanted him to major in textiles because, at the time, he thought it would mean a guaranteed job.

John already knew where he wanted to go to college: Clemson University. Wallace had grown up near the South Carolina campus and often talked about how much he'd wanted to go there. He and John were avid Clemson football fans, watching every game they could together. So John came up with a way to go to school there. He reasoned that if he stayed with his maternal grandmother, who lived near the university, and got a football scholarship as a walk-on, then he could afford it.

Edwards spent his first semester of college living in WestPoint Stevens's Utica Mill village in South Carolina. It was far removed from the frat parties and drinking games that other 18-year-olds were experiencing. He and his grandmother had a simple routine.

"We would get up in the morning -- it was one of those little houses in the mill village and the only source of heat was the wood heater in the middle of the house -- and we would start the stove and she'd cook me breakfast," he recalls. He would drive the eight or nine miles to campus, for classes and football practice, and return to his grandmother's for meals.

In the end, his plan didn't work. Edwards made the football team but did not win a scholarship and could not afford to stay. For his second semester, he transferred to North Carolina State, where in-state tuition was less. In keeping with his father's advice, he majored in textiles technology.

"I didn't want to go to college and then not be able to get a job," he says today. But the idea of law school was alluring. And the more time he spent working in the mill each summer, the more he realized that he wanted a different life.

"It was the nastiest job. I cleaned out overhead in the weave room. There was junk everywhere. I was climbing around up there, then I mopped the grease up from under the looms."

One day, a longtime worker at the mill gave him a piece of advice.

"I'll never forget him," Edwards says. "He was a weaver, and he was standing next to the loom, and I came walking by. He had his overalls on. And he said, 'Boy, you don't want to do this the rest of your life. You need to keep going to school.' " In barely 20 years, the Robbins mill that had run for decades would be gone. By the time it closed, Wallace Edwards had retired, and the workforce had dwindled to 300. "It was sad," John Edwards says, to see a way of life vanish. But by then, he was already a millionaire, already a legend in North Carolina legal circles and already acquiring the polish and political skills he'd need to rise even higher.