John Edwards: From mill town to the national stage [View All]

[LSK]

When Bobbie Wade Edwards entered the hospital in June 1953 to give birth to John, Wallace Edwards couldn't pay the $100 bill to bring his wife and son home.

This was nothing new. Ever since the Edwardses had come east from Georgia's Blue Ridge mountains to South Carolina generations earlier, settling in mill towns around the Piedmont plateau, money had been tight. Wallace's father sold shoes and rose to become a furniture store manager. Young Bobbie Wade's father, a handsome Marine with a seventh-grade education, worked cleaning mills after a boxing injury left him partially paralyzed.

To satisfy hospital officials and spring his wife and son, Wallace Edwards took out a $50 loan, at 100 percent interest.

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By Johnny's third birthday the family had moved five times across the Carolinas, and up the economic ladder as well. Wallace Edwards spent most of his career with Milliken & Co., which owned a string of textile mills, and he received promotions from floor worker to ``time study'' jobs - monitoring worker productivity - to supervisor. Over time, the family went from living in a public housing project to a ranch-style brick home on a tree-lined street.

Even then, Wallace Edwards believed that his lack of a college degree kept him from advancing at work, which he found both frustrating and embarrassing. ``I remember waking up at 5 a.m. and seeing my father watching those little shows on TV to try to learn how to do math problems,'' John Edwards says. ``He thought it would help him at work.''

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/10/05/from_mill_town_to_the_national_stage_boston_globe/?page=full

John Edwards story is the classic story of the American dream where if you work hard you can come from a blue collar background and eventually buy a big house on the hill.

For all the assholes who only want to look at the house on the hill, shame on you for not looking at how he got there and where he came from.