Senator’s hometown, pink house in spotlight

SENECA, S.C. — Not since a local girl made it into the pages of Playboy magazine has this small conservative town in northwest South Carolina been the focus of so much national attention.

“We’ve had people driving by all day long,” said Linda Thomas, referring to the tiny pink house next door where Sen. John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat running for president, lived as an infant.

Though Mr. Edwards routinely mentions the modest three-room rental as his first home, his family didn’t live there very long. Soon after he was born, the Edwardses moved into a larger house they built on the other side of town.

“I don’t guess he spent his first birthday there,” said Mrs. Thomas, whose husband, Broadus, has lived in the house next door since 1939.

The house the Edwardses moved into does not appear in campaign ads, and residents of the middle-class Seneca neighborhood aren’t even sure exactly which house it is.

The issue of Mr. Edwards’ lifestyle surfaced last week at a candidate’s forum in Columbia when someone asked Mr. Edwards how he hopes to relate to the working poor since he’s made many millions of dollars as a personal-injury lawyer and owns a mansion in Georgetown and a mansion on exclusive Figure Eight Island off North Carolina.

Mr. Edwards responded that while his life is an American success story, he hasn’t forgotten the hardships of common life.

To show that, Mr. Edwards has incorporated the pink millworker’s house into his populist campaign for president. It appears in several TV advertisements Mr. Edwards has run all over the country.

“He wants to show people that he came from a small beginning,” said Mr. Thomas, who now owns the house and uses it for storage.

“Somebody said he wants to make the pink house what Abraham Lincoln made of his log cabin,” Mrs. Thomas added.

The Thomases didn’t know the connection between their house and the U.S. senator until Mr. Edwards first contacted them last year about filming the house for campaign commercials.

“He is a doll baby,” said Mrs. Thomas, who allowed the film crew to use her home. “We just love him to death.”

In addition to showing — some around here call it exaggerating — Mr. Edwards’ humble beginnings, the house and surrounding neighborhood figure largely in his campaign. Mr. Edwards often talks about the need to stem the flow of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, where labor is much cheaper.

Mr. Edwards’ father once worked as a foreman at the hulking mill, which closed two years ago, costing 600 people their jobs and, Mr. Thomas said, letting the tidy mill community deteriorate.

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