By Miles Layton

EDENTON — I’ve known Ed Goodwin many years – seen him make speeches near and far; stories I’ve written for local and regional media outlets.

Goodwin worked well with former state Senator Bob Steinburg when the two were a dynamic duo from Chowan County; the same can be said of his close relationship with state Senator Norm Sanderson.

Many times, I covered stories when Goodwin presented a big giant check to local governments and various groups for important local infrastructure projects.

I’ve listened to Goodwin campaign on Belvidere Day while talking to voters, with a cold drink at Layden’s Supermarket nearby. I’ve attended a church service that included a birthday tribute to his mother, who is nearly 102. Ed is a good person with deep roots in Chowan County; an authentic politician, which is a rarity these days.

Beyond politics, Goodwin’ story is inspiring to folks who have tilled the land, pulled tobacco in a hot harvest sun and risen from humble beginnings, but never forgot who they are or where they came from.    

Goodwin’s path from a Chowan County tobacco farm to the protective details of U.S. presidents began with a phone call at midnight.

Goodwin, a Republican, is seeking reelection to the N.C. House in District 1, which represents Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Perquimans, Tyrrell and Washington counties.

His Democratic opponent is Miriam Rollin from Duck.

The election is November 3, with early voting starting Thursday, Oct. 15.

At 74, Goodwin has been an Air Force missile specialist, a federal agent, a county commissioner, the head of the state Ferry Division and a legislator. He said all of it was a detour on the way back to the farm where he grew up.

“Home is a special place,” Goodwin said during a recent interview in Edenton.

Drafted, then enlisted

Goodwin was born in Edenton on Sept. 4, 1952, and raised on his family’s farm. After graduating from John A. Holmes High School in 1970, he worked the land. He played some junior varsity sports, he said, but farm work came first.

“At that time, the main thing was tobacco,” he said. “Then the next thing was peanuts, and then sometimes some corn or soybeans.”

He enrolled at East Carolina University but was drafted before finishing. Friends and cousins were in Vietnam, some of them wounded, he said, and his father had a feeling about it.

Goodwin called an Air Force recruiter in Elizabeth City around midnight. The recruiter was not happy to be woken up, Goodwin said, and asked why he had the number.

The recruiter told him to be in the office at 6:30 the next morning. Goodwin said he arrived at 6. He finished the entrance test so quickly that the recruiter assumed something was wrong. When the test was graded, Goodwin said, the recruiter told him it was the highest score he had ever seen.

The score led to work with intercontinental ballistic missiles, much of it in Wyoming and the Dakotas. Goodwin said the job carried a weight that not everyone could bear.

“That was the intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles that if you turn the key and push the button, the whole world was on,” he said. A few of the men he served with were discharged because they could not handle the pressure, he said.

Goodwin served four years in the Air Force, from 1972 to 1976, and was honorably discharged. He received the Air Force Airman’s Medal for Heroism. He went back to ECU and earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice in 1981.

In 1983, he joined the Naval Criminal Investigative Service as a special agent. He said the work included protective duty for U.S. presidents and visiting foreign leaders. From 1989 to 1992, he served as an inspector under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in the former Soviet Union, checking compliance with the arms agreement reached by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Goodwin said he came to know Reagan, who was born in Illinois and liked to ask about farming in eastern North Carolina. When Goodwin told him he was leaving for an assignment in Japan, he said, the president took off his own tie bar and put it on Goodwin’s tie.

“I like farm boys. You know that, don’t you?” Goodwin recalled Reagan saying.

“Yes, sir,” he answered.

He said his time in the service and as a federal agent was what he had hoped it would be. “I did what I thought I wanted to do, and it was fun,” he said.

Back to Chowan

Goodwin said his father and grandfather always told him the same thing about the family farm.

“This place where you live is the best place in the world,” he recalled. “Do anything you want to do. Get it done. Get it out of the way. Then come home. Come back to the farm. Take care of me and your mama as we age.”

He kept to that. After retiring from federal service in 2004, he moved home with his wife, Lori, and joined the family farming business. His father died at 83. Near the end, Goodwin said, the elder man asked one thing of him.

“Take care of your mama,” Goodwin recalled his father saying. “Make sure she’s all right.”

Ed joined several family members and wonderful caregivers to look after his mother, who is still living, close to 102 years old, and Goodwin said she still sings in church on occasion. He and his wife look after her. “Probably not too many younguns that will do exactly what their parents told them to do years, seventy years ago,” he said.

Goodwin described a close family. He recalled bringing colleagues from his federal days to the farm, where they met his father and saw how the two got along. One of them told the elder Goodwin that he and his son had “a relationship, lock solid.”

“I love my boys, and my boys love me, and my wife loves me,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin said he entered politics because of what he saw in the county’s books. The county had money on paper but was not spending it, he said, and as he looked into it, he concluded the reserves were gone.

“They had forty million dollars in surplus, and it was gone,” he said.

He was elected to the Chowan County Board of Commissioners in 2008 and served as chairman before leaving the board in 2012. He said he took documents about how the money was supposed to be spent to a district attorney in Elizabeth City, who was not receptive. Goodwin said his answer to the county’s condition was simple: “We’ll build it back up.”

In 2012, he ran for secretary of state against Democratic incumbent Elaine Marshall and lost. He described the race as close. He later became an aide to Gov. Pat McCrory, who appointed him director of the N.C. Department of Transportation Ferry Division in 2014.

Goodwin said he asked for the job. When McCrory asked what it would take to keep him on, he said, “Give me the ferry division.”

“It’s in disarray. I can fix it,” Goodwin said he told the governor.

“You can’t fix everything,” McCrory answered, according to Goodwin. Goodwin said he replied, “But if I try to fix everything, I’ll get the majority of it.”

He said he started the next morning. During his time as director, he said, the division sold two aging ferries for about $5.5 million and worked to keep the proceeds with the division. He also had expensive engines moved out of the weather. He left the job in 2017 after the administration changed.

In Raleigh

Goodwin was elected to the N.C. House in 2018 and is seeking his fifth term. His committee assignments have included agriculture, appropriations, marine resources and aquaculture, transportation, and military and veterans affairs, which he has chaired. The N.C. Chamber of Commerce has named him a Jobs Champion seven times since 2019.

Farmers, he said, are at the center of his work in Raleigh.

“You need a farmer, and you need him every day, three times a day,” Goodwin said. “That doctor, you need that guy, or that dentist, like once in a blue moon.”

He said farmers seldom make a fuss about their importance. His father and grandmother taught him that farming is “like doing God’s work,” he said. Asked what matters most, he named food. “I like that home cooking stuff,” he said. He still hunts and fishes, and he said the women in his family turn the deer, ducks and other game into stew.

Goodwin also counts himself a defender of the state’s commercial shrimpers. When a fight over trawling threatened their industry, he said, he told his staff to call every newspaper, television station and radio station and then bring in the shrimpers. They came from across the state with their families, he said, and some drove big trucks to Raleigh and blew their horns.

“I’m gonna make sure y’all are heard, and I’m heard,” he said he told them.

His argument for shrimpers is a practical one. A shrimper owns a boat, works the water and sells what he catches, Goodwin said. “That man is paying his own way,” he said.

He expects the issue to return, perhaps this session, and said he is ready for it.

Goodwin said he has also tried to bring state money to each of the towns in his district — the Washington County Emergency Center in Plymouth, help for the old State Theater in Hertford and money for an Underground Railroad site in Plymouth. He said he tries to deliver something to the main town in every county he represents.

On the campaign trail, Goodwin said, he has also heard from teachers who want higher pay — a measure he has supported time and again to increase teacher salaries. 

If he is returned to Raleigh, Goodwin said, another goal is one he has chased without success: formal state recognition of the Tuscarora Indian Nation.

“Ever since I’ve been there, I’ve been trying to do one thing that I can’t get done,” he said. “I tell them all the time, there would be no us if it wasn’t for the Tuscarora Indian Nation.”

Goodwin said the Tuscarora are “the only Indian tribe in the state of North Carolina that has treaties with the state of North Carolina and treaties with the U.S. government.” He said he plans to keep pushing.

“I told them I wanted to stay there until I got them recognized,” he said.

His wife would like him to slow down, Goodwin said, but she has not stopped him. “If you go satisfy anybody in your family, you got to satisfy her, right?” he said.

Asked what he would tell voters, he offered no slogan. “Vote your conscience,” he said.

Asked what he likes best about northeastern North Carolina, Goodwin told a story about a funeral. A well-known fisherman from the Outer Banks had died, and Goodwin went even though traffic made him late. The family fed him sandwiches and ice cream and told him how much the man would have appreciated his coming.

“Them people don’t never forget you,” he said. “Farmers, you got a friend for life.”