Bill Edwards

William Ralph Edwards was born on April 13, 1918 (yep, he shared a birthday with Brother and Cissie) and died on July 28, 1996. (The Catawba County farm where he was born is now at the bottom of Lake Norman.)

For years, Bill served as executive director of the Children's Home in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he grew up with his sister, Faye. Bill, age 9, and Faye arrived there on Aug. 24, 1927 from Long Island in Catawba County. He was an outstanding student at R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, from which he graduated in 1934 at age 16. While in high school, he was a star athlete on "the Children's Home Fighting Methodists" teams. (The Children's Home only had grades 1-9, but when its older residents moved to Reynolds High, they'd still play on its athletic teams. Sports was extremely important to the home's young residents.)

Bill graduated from Brevard College in 1937. That fall, he went to Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., where he majored in math and history. He was captain of the football team and president of his senior class. In 1940, he returned to the Children's Home as a teacher and coach while earning his master's degree in education from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. In 1949, he became principal of the home's school. In 1966, he came assistant superintendent of the home, and in 1969 he became the home's seventh superintendent.

He retired from the home -- the place where he had lived 50 of his 65 years -- in 1983. That same year, he was hired by Arbor Acres, the Methodist retirement home built on the Children's Home's old peach orchard (and the place where he would move after Cissie's death). At Arbor Acres, he used his contacts in the Methodist Church to help with fundraising. He worked there for two years, retiring from that position in 1985. He continued to do volunteer work.

Bill garnered many honors over the years, including an honorary degree, doctor of humanities, from Pfeiffer College in 1976. The athlete also served as a football referee in the Southern and Atlantic Coast Conference, officiating at three Orange Bowls and a Cotton Bowl.
David Edwards, son of Cissie and Bill (that's him as a little guy in the 1960s in the photo above), volunteers that Cissie went to Hanes High School and Bill to Reynolds, Hanes' archrival. "Mother said she could not have conceived of dating someone who went to Reynolds, let alone marrying him," he said. "But she did." The two met when Cissie was working as a secretary to the Winston-Salem school system's business manager and Bill, who was principal of the Children's Home School (grades 1-9), visited the central office, where Cissie worked, to correct some errors that Cissie had caught in his monthly reports. "According to Dad, he intentionally made errors so he would have an excuse to see her," David said. "Mother said he was not that clever."

We think they were both pretty clever.

They were married on Nov. 23, 1955.

On April 2, 1976, Bill received an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Pfieffer College. Dr. Douglas Reid Sasser, Pfeiffer's president, made the presentation.

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Below are some snapshots I took in November 2011, when David and Dee Ann took me on a delightful tour of the Children's Home where their dad grew up, became a leader and now is honored in several ways (there are many references to him in the campus' museum, including two of the photos below. The home still serves children in need, though in different ways than when they grew up on its grounds. The two houses pictured are those that the Edwards family lived in when we Millers used to visit them as kids.