John Edwards: The Natural

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"People always underestimate my son," says his mother Bobbie, and it's easy to see why. Johnny Reid Edwards was born in Seneca, S.C., a rural corner of the state where Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina collide. Edwards' parents were millworkers who had to take out a $50 loan to pay the hospital bill. Bobbie sewed kids' swimsuits for a living; Wallace labored as a $35-a-week textile worker from the day after he graduated from high school. But they were moving up. The Edwardses' ancestors had lived in up-country Carolina and Georgia for several generations and, like many striving in that region, had made the jump from poor sharecroppers to less poor cotton-mill workers. The family story even includes a classic cornpone beginning: Bobbie and Wallace met at a square dance. Wallace asked Bobbie for her phone number--"and we went from there," she told TIME last week. They were married in 1952. John arrived in 1953; siblings Kathy and Blake came later.

The Edwards family moved a lot during the 1950s as Wallace chased better-paying jobs. It was a game of diminishing returns because the textile companies gave the best jobs to college graduates. Wallace had to swallow his pride when he was asked to teach the shiny management recruits how a mill really functioned. "They would start them off paying them more than they were paying me, and I had to train them," he recalled last week. "You can imagine how I felt." John remembers waking up one morning to find his father sitting in the living room surrounded by pencils and paper and watching dreary math-instruction programs on TV, trying to catch up.

Still, Edwards' youth seems in all ways normal and in some ways prophetic. He was friendly--more like his outgoing mom than like his dad, recalls John Frye, Wallace's friend and the father of Edwards' best boyhood chum. Growing up chiefly in Robbins, N.C., Edwards played hoops in his backyard and contended with neighborhood bullies by following his dad's advice: Don't wait for trouble; punch the other guy hard in the nose first. Addicted to Perry Mason and The Fugitive on TV, Edwards wrote an essay in Grade 6 called "Why I Want to Be a Lawyer." ("I would like to protect innocent people from blind justice" is how he naively put it.) Only an average student, Edwards lettered in four high school sports and had a reputation as a devastating hitter on the football field. He rarely let any limitation stand in his way: he once joined the tennis team to chase the prettiest girl in the school.