Few newspaper photos fall into the memorable category, but one that will remain in my mind appeared on the May 16 front page of the N&O. Photographer Takaaki Iwabu captured three generations of Edwardses in profile – grandfather, son and granddaughter – leaving federal court in Greensboro.

It was a painful and revealing moment for a family hurled into a maelstrom by John Edwards.

Wallace and Bobbie Edwards have stood by their reckless son, as has John’s daughter and oldest child Cate, throughout the trial. They are stoic under fire, and I admire them for it.

For Edwards’ aging parents, who grew up in a different era that today’s social scientists call Old America, seeing their golden boy exposed as a liar and an adulterer who not only cheated on his dying wife but also sired a child by a New Age siren, has to bend the very armor of their souls.

Wallace and Bobbie Edwards are virtually unknown to their fellow North Carolinians. Maybe that’s because they have led unpretentious, small-town lives in that wide middle ground between “getting by” and modest economic success.

Wallace spent most of his working life in the textile trades, eventually rising to supervisor in the mills, as far as he could go without a college degree, he said in a 2010 interview. Bobbie was a standout basketball player in high school and continued to play pickup games with her kids for years afterward.

And there are other kids besides John, a younger son and a daughter. Neither has sought a place in the sun like their ambitious sibling.

Bobbie took to politics with more zest than Wallace. She has a reputation as a good Southern cook, and as good Southern cooks go, she went ... into fund-raising.

A conceit of Edwards’ campaigns for the Senate, the vice presidency and finally the presidency itself was Bobbie’s offer of her peanut butter pie recipe for a campaign contribution tied to dates. During Edwards’ 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, for instance, a contribution of $20.08 sprang loose the recipe.

Strangely, for all the uncountable terabytes of data on the Internet, Bobbie’s peanut butter pie recipe doesn’t come up on Google or other search engines. At least, a friend and I haven’t found it, though I suspect Bobbie’s recipe is similar to Jimmy Carter’s peanut butter pie (cooks.com/recipes/pies).

It was out of this comfortable environment that Johnny Reid Edwards rocketed into the highest orbit of American politics. For Wallace and Bobbie Edwards back in little Robbins, N.C., their overachieving son was an exemplar of what all parents want: A better life than the one they had known.

For a blessed while, that was true. But that dream turned toxic when John Edwards made crystal-gazing Rielle Hunter his mistress.

The trajectory of Edwards’ life afterward echoes Greek tragedy, but I side with those who discern a modern parallel in Willie Stark, the wildly flawed populist in Robert Penn Warren’s “All The King’s Men.”

Like Willie, who entered politics as an idealist but could not resist the temptation of absolute power, John Edwards too was consumed by reckless ambition – hubris, the Greeks called it.

Stark is fiction, Edwards is real. They could easily pass the peanut butter pie, and for each other.