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Living the Life Continued...
Starting Out
The youngest of four children born into a military family, Edwards
wrestled and competed with three older brothers who showed her
no mercy. Six years before she was born, her father John Perry
Edwards won the Navy Cross for gallantry as one of the first
pilots to mount a counterattack at Pearl Harbor. "My brothers
treated me as just another kid, so I had to defend myself,"
she says. "I always ran faster, so I could get away. My dad
called me his fourth son."
Growing up before the passage of Title IX, which mandated equal
opportunity for boys and girls in collegiate athletics, Edwards
had no chance for high school sports, so she joined the band
and became cheerleader. "My senior year, I ran for student body
president," she says. "No girl had ever been elected in history,
and I lost to a boy. This was 1964 and the feminist movement
had not happened. Women's sport had not happened. It was the
beginning of my being different."
A straight-A student, Edwards enrolled at the University of
California-Berkeley. "What I remember most was a tolerance that
is unfortunately not so prevalent today," she recalls. "My boyfriend,
John Taylor, would go to practice ROTC marching drills on Saturdays
while I would picket the Vietnam War at Sproul Plaza."
Like many youth of her day, Edwards took on the challenge of
John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech and his famous exhortation,
"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country."
"We bought into that, we believed it and we practiced it," she
said. After getting a master's degree in exercise physiology,
she enrolled as a Red Cross volunteer in Vietnam for 18 months
in 1970-71. "We weren't nurses," said Edwards. "Our mission
was to raise troop morale. But when we got in country, it became
obvious that in many ways our government was lying to us."
The most tragic moment in her Vietnam experience came when Edwards'
best friend was murdered by a G.I. who broke into her living
quarters. Edwards vowed to survive, buying a .45 caliber pistol
that she tucked under her pillow at night for the rest of her
stay. "If anyone walked into my room and refused to stop, I
vowed to use it," she recalls. "I wasn't going to die there."
Upon returning home, Edwards decompressed by backpacking around
the world with her boyfriend. Returning with $200 in her bank
account and an old Volkswagen Beetle, she moved in with Taylor-
no marriage involved. "It was another of many barriers I broke
in my life," said Edwards. "I had the choice of bending to what
the prevailing American culture expected of me- marrying and
having two kids. But I chose the other path, and Mustang Sally
was starting to emerge."
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