Edwards uses house to drive message home

SENECA — John Edwards hopes the teeny pink house becomes for him what the log cabin was for Lincoln.

But to Linda and Broadus Thomas, the Seneca cottage they now own is where they do their laundry and store surplus vegetables.

Millions of voters in five hot primary states, though, have been exposed only to Edwards’ version of the house where he first lived.

With Edwards, the house stars in a television commercial in which the N.C. senator promises to lift up forgotten classes of Americans. Behind him, the house also seems to speak.

“He may be a senator now,” it seems to say. “He may live in a Washington, D.C., mansion. But once, he wasn’t so rich. Look at what a teeny-tiny house he lived in.”

What the house doesn’t say is that Edwards lived in it from birth to age 1 and no longer.

Still, Edwards speaks of it lovingly.

“The place my parents brought me home to is a place like a lot of the places South Carolinians grow up in,” he said before the Democratic debate in Greenville last week.

“It represents what my life is,” he continued. “If it’s not the most tangible symbol of the campaign, it’s up there.”

While the house has served the Edwards campaign well, as anyone who has seen the commercial knows, it is less than the perfect political prop.

The place — after the Edwards family moved out — was shingled in a salmon pink that is far from presidential.

Still, built in 1927, the house was more than ready for its close-up. It looks old, but neat and dignified. And fortunately for Edwards, its current owners had no problem letting him use it, even though they voted for George Bush in 2000.

The Thomases do not live in what they call “the pink house” at 23 Sirrene St. It’s more an extension of their own house, which lies a few yards away.

Though they did not tell John Edwards, the pink house is where the Thomases wash their clothes.

It is also where they store surplus vegetables from their garden and their grown children’s old bicycles and water skis. Broadus Thomas also uses the house as his wood shop.

“It’s not anything but an old junk house,” he said.

The Thomases’ own house is far lovelier and larger, and immaculately kept.

Broadus, 72, has called it home since he worked in Seneca’s textile mill as a young boy. Linda Thomas grew up a few miles away, in Seneca’s town proper. She also worked in the mill, as did both of Edwards’ parents, Wallace and Bobbie Edwards. After 102 years of production, the mill closed in 2001.

The Thomases bought the pink house in the late 1950s, a few years after the Edwards family moved out. It cost them $1,800, and they paid cash. They intended to rent it out. But its three rooms — about 1,000 square feet total — proved so useful they never sought tenants.

Not until this summer did they learn that their storage building was John Edwards’ first home.

They remember the Edwards family, though.

The 278-home mill village was an especially neighborly place in 1953, when Wallace and Bobbie Edwards brought their infant son, John, home from the hospital. Broadus Thomas was a soldier in Korea at the time.

The mill was prospering then, and so was the village. These days, Broadus says, he’s embarrassed by the ramshackle state of some of the houses visitors must pass to reach his well-tended home, the pink house and three others he owns nearby.

The Edwardses left because Wallace Edwards was rising in the mill ranks and, as a supervisor, could afford to move the family to town, to a much roomier home. The family later would move to Georgia and then, when John was 12, settle in Robbins, N.C.

The larger Seneca house the Edwards family lived in, though still standing and their home for longer, is not featured in any campaign commercial.

But Edwards says his mill village ties did not end at babyhood. When he moved back to Seneca as a Clemson University freshman, he returned to the mill village to live with his grandmother, just about three blocks from the pink house.

This summer, when Edwards’ uncle Harold Addis, of Seneca, asked the Thomases whether the house could be filmed for campaign use, the couple did not hesitate.

An hour after the call, a film crew arrived in more than a dozen cars and trucks, brimming with lights and cameras.

The Thomases, as requested, took their laundry off the line. They removed the woodpile from the pink house’s porch. They looked the other way when the makeup artist spread the tools of her trade all over their kitchen.

“That little girl just turned my kitchen upside down!” Linda Thomas said.

She and her husband received no payment for their hospitality.

“We weren’t offered any, and we certainly wouldn’t take any if we were,” he said. “I like John Edwards, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t do this for him.”

Some fans of President Bush might think the Thomases went too far to accommodate a Democrat.

Actually, the Thomases are Democrats. They simply preferred Bush in the last presidential election, they said.

This year, though, upset with the turmoil in Iraq and Bush’s plan to make millions of illegal immigrants legal, the Thomases might support a Democrat. On Tuesday, they plan to vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary. They will probably vote for Edwards.

Probably, but not definitely.

It’s not that the Thomases don’t like John Edwards. On the contrary, Linda Thomas says, they adore him.

“You couldn’t ask for anyone nicer than John Edwards. He comes in here and says, ‘Miz Thomas, I have to use your bathroom.’ They shaved him in my kitchen. We go to church with his Aunt Rita. He is so down to earth it’s pitiful.”

Broadus Thomas said he is generally dissatisfied with what the candidates, including Edwards, offer.

“None of them have good platforms,” he said.

Linda Thomas jumps in to reiterate the couple’s personal admiration for Edwards and how they wish him “all the luck in the world.”

She adds, though, that the senator is fortunate to have his good looks to fall back on.

“Maybe if he doesn’t go in this term, he can be a male model.”

Reach Markoe at (202) 302-7601 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com.