Just below a sliding window, there’s a boxy, silver, very commercial sink. The walls are unremarkably white; the floorboards unremarkably wooden.
It’s places like this that make for good mythology. Not because of its distinctly indistinct style, but rather because of who grew up here.
“When you read about him living in the one room, it's here,” says Debbie Peek. “This is the room.”
This is the room where Lindsey Graham grew up; the room in the back of Urban Central, a gifts and decor shop at 211 West Main Street in Central. Right next door is The Mexican, a onetime house that’s now a restaurant.
Out front of these places is the spot where Graham, in 2016, announced that he was running for president. It was a heady moment for Central, seeing its most famous son reach for the highest office in the land, in front of his former house on Main Street, USA.
As the machinery of government and elections goes on without Lindsey Graham, the late senator’s hometown is taking a moment to reflect on who Graham was a a person.
Central Mayor Kenneth Dill remembers Graham as dryly funny and unassuming enough to remember that he still liked a good fast food sandwich and fries. Graham didn’t forget his hometown, Dill says, and often just popped up in line behind folks who weren’t sure they were seeing who they thought they were seeing.
Fifty-odd years ago, though, no one much saw the small-framed, gritty kid with the tiny signature turning into one of the most influential people in American politics. The Lindsey that people grew up with describe him as humorous, down-to-earth, humble, tough, and as determined as anyone they’d ever seen when he set his mind to something.
At D.W. Daniel High School, whence Graham graduated in 1973, memories come spilling out of his senior yearbook. The principal of Daniel these days is Adam Russell, who only met Graham when he came back for a visit to his old high school a few years ago.
But Russell has a tie to Graham that nobody else does.
“Lanham Lewis, my wife's grandmother, taught Lindsey Graham in 10th grade English,” Russell says. “And of course, what, what do I ask? ‘How was he in class?’”
Turns out, the kids from humble, one-room beginnings didn’t give off big Senator energy in high school.
“The future senator was just a normal kid,” Russell says.
And kind of a lousy golfer.
“[I was talking to, to Uncle Bill yesterday,” he says. “Bill was a year younger than him, and they were on the golf team together And Bill feels like, you know, he wasn't that good. But he kept at it, right? He just kept, kept working at it, and kept showing up.”
Russell admires the drive, but finds the fact that Lindsey Graham was pretty much like anyone else in high school to be inspiring.
“There’s something very American about it,” he says. “I mean, he wasn't nobility. He wasn't blue-blooded. It’s like the American dream. You're not the star on the football team. You're not the star on the golf team, but you are engaged, and growing, and getting better. You can do it. If you want it.”
A few miles up the road from D.W. Daniel is the even-tinier-than-Central town of Six Mile. This is where one of Graham’s oldest friends, Tom von Kaenel, lives. He met Graham in 1969, at age 14. While Graham went off to the U.S. Air Force, von Kaenel went off to West Point.
In his (almost) retirement, von Kaenel is a veterans’ advocate who runs a nonprofit retreat on his property called the Semper Fi Barn. Under the barn’s overhanging roof hang 5,500 dog tags that von Kaenel stamps himself with a machine in one of the rooms. He’s stamped a dog tag for Graham; he turns it over and over in his hands while we talk.
“I was thinking about it yesterday, what can you do?,” von Kaenel says. "I love this guy. He's a friend of mine. Well, I think his actions speak for themselves. He deployed 19 times. And some people say, ‘Well, you know, you were only there 145 days.’ Well, I tell you what, when you look at those 3,500 guys that, that were killed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, they were only in combat for one day. That doesn't lessen their sacrifice, and it shouldn't lessen Lindsey's sacrifice at all. He volunteered. He went when there was recess. Normally, people in Congress take vacations. He went to war.”
Von Kaenel plans to do a celebration of life soon. That will involve hanging his friend’s dog tag with the others. They tinkle in the slight breeze. To von Kaenel, it’s the veterans who are no longer with us talking to each other. He’s looking forward to hearing his friend join the conversation.
