After World War II, jobs became hard to find in Scranton. Joe Biden Sr. finally decided he’d do better in Wilmington, Delaware. He’d lived in that city before, and he’d heard that Wilmington industries were doing well after the war. He took a job there cleaning boilers for Kyle Heating and Air-Conditioning. Wilmington was more than 140 miles from Scranton, but Joe Sr. drove back and forth for almost a year without complaining.
In 1952, when Joey was almost ten, his parents decided to move the whole family to Wilmington. It must have been hard for Jean Biden, who’d grown up in Scranton, to leave her town—all her family and friends and neighbors. But she didn’t complain either.
“Mr. Bu-Bu-Bu-Bu-Biden”
Joey’s mother pitched the move as an exciting fresh start. Just think, she told the children, their new home was brand-new—they’d be the first people to set foot in it! Jean Biden was like that. She looked on the bright side, and she encouraged her children to look on the bright side too.
Joey Biden didn’t need encouragement to be excited. Of course it was an adventure, waving goodbye to Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania, riding all the way south past Philadelphia, and finally reaching Delaware. Joey knew that Delaware was the second-smallest state in the Union, after Rhode Island. It was also the First State—the first state to ratify the US Constitution.
Almost as soon as the Bidens crossed the state line, they were on the outskirts of Wilmington. From the back seat of the family car, Joey, Valerie, and their little brother, Jimmy, peered out at the smoky industrial landscape. There was a steel mill, a chemical company, oil refineries.
Wilmington was the largest city in Delaware. The Bidens were moving to a section on the northern edge, called Claymont, where the steel-mill workers lived. Their new home was in Brookview Apartments, a development still under construction. Joseph Biden was still cleaning boilers for Kyle Heating and Air-Conditioning, and the family could barely afford their small apartment.
Jean Biden had decided the move was a good chance for Joey to repeat a grade. He was young and small for his class, and he’d missed some school in Scranton when he’d had his tonsils out. So Joey began third grade again at Holy Rosary, a Catholic grade school in Claymont. In his new school Joey quickly made friends and jumped into sports, his favorite activity. But he was still one of the shortest kids in his class, and that bothered him.
Joey’s parents and teachers were more worried about his stutter, which held him back in schoolwork. The nuns encouraged him, telling Joey he was a good boy, a smart boy. If a classmate teased him about his stutter, the teachers defended him. So did his mother. When Joey got frustrated with his stutter, she told him how handsome he was, how smart, what a good athlete. “You’ve got so much to say, honey, that your brain gets ahead of you.”
In spite of challenges with schoolwork, Joey began to dream big about where he wanted to go to high school. His choice was Archmere Academy, a college preparatory school close by in Claymont. Joey could see his dream school, a marble mansion, from his upstairs bedroom window. And when he played football in the Catholic Youth Organization, he and his team entered Archmere’s wrought-iron gates and practiced on the school’s spacious grounds. Joey loved to imagine his future self in high school, a star athlete at Archmere Academy.
Meanwhile, Joey was comfortable with the nuns—the teaching sisters—at Holy Rosary. Along with the usual reading and writing and math, they taught values: fairness, helpfulness, honesty, courage. They taught the children that when a bully was picking on somebody, the noble thing to do was to stand up to the bully.
The nuns’ values were the same as the ones that Joey’s mother and father taught their children around the kitchen table. Joseph and Jean Biden could not stand meanness, and they could not stand people who used their power to tyrannize others. Another Biden principle: if you make a promise, keep it—for your own honor and for your family’s. “My word as a Biden” was a solemn oath.
One of Joey’s favorite teachers was Sister Lawrence Joseph, who played baseball with the kids at recess. Lifting the long skirts of her habit, she ran the bases. Like a good coach, she encouraged Joey not to worry about his size. “You know, my brother was small too, Joey, but he was a really good athlete.”
In 1955 the Bidens moved from the apartment in Claymont to a new split-level house in Mayfield, closer to downtown Wilmington. In Mayfield, most of the families were Protestant, and most of the fathers were college-educated. They worked for DuPont Chemical—a successful and growing corporation—as chemists, lawyers, or accountants.
Later in life, Joe Biden reflected that his father must have felt out of place in this neighborhood. Joseph Biden was now the manager of a Chevrolet dealership. Selling cars was a better job than cleaning boilers, but not a professional job like the other fathers had. However, Joseph took pride in dressing well, and he went off to work every day wearing a suit and tie, his shoes shined, his fingernails manicured.
Sometimes, looking into his father’s closet, Joey wondered about the black equestrian boots and the polo stick, gear for expensive sports that Joseph Biden would never play again. He gazed at pictures of the horses that his father used to keep on his uncle’s estate on Long Island. Joey sensed a big disconnect there, but his father never talked about his high-flying early life.
Living in Mayfield, Joey attended Saint Helena’s, another Catholic school. Like many of the other boys, Joey admired the priests, and once he even asked his mother if he could go to a training school to become a priest. Jean Biden put him off, telling her son
