“She’s your sister, Joey.”
Joey understood. To be loyal to his sister, he couldn’t report her. But if he couldn’t do his job on safety patrol, he would have to resign. The next day, he gave up his blue badge.
By the time Joey was in the eighth grade, he was well aware that his family’s money was tight. If he wore a hole in the bottom of his shoe, he might have to put a piece of cardboard inside until his father’s next payday. When he was invited to a dance, he had to scrape together an outfit from his father’s clothes.
Joseph Biden’s dress shirt was much too big for Joey, so his mother turned the cuffs back and fastened them like French cuffs. Only, she couldn’t find his father’s cuff links. When she came back with nuts and bolts instead, Joey was horrified. “I am not going to wear this. The kids will make fun of me.”
Calmly fastening the cuffs with the hardware, Jean Biden told her son, “If anybody says anything to you about these nuts and bolts, you just look them right in the eye and say, ‘Don’t you have a pair of these?’ ”
At the dance, it turned out that Joey was right. While he was pouring himself a drink at the punch bowl, a boy grabbed his arm and exclaimed, “Look at Biden! Nuts and bolts!”
But Jean Biden was right too. Heeding her advice, Joey stared at the other boy. “Don’t you have a pair of these?”
The confidence in Joey’s voice must have shaken the other boy. There was a silence, while the group waited to see what he would answer. Finally he seemed to decide that nuts-and-bolts cuff links must be the latest fad. “Yeah,” he said. “I got a pair of these.”
As Joe progressed through the seventh and eighth grades at Saint Helena’s, he fixed his sights more than ever on Archmere Academy. But the tuition at Archmere was $300 a year. His father tried to get Joe to consider a less expensive Catholic high school, or even the public high school.
Joe understood that his family couldn’t afford to pay the tuition, but that didn’t change his determination to go to Archmere. There had to be another way. After passing the Archmere entrance examination, he applied for a work-study program. Joe would do work for the school, and in exchange, his tuition fees would be waived.
So the summer before his freshman year of high school, Joe worked on the Archmere grounds crew. Every day, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, he was one of a crew of about ten. The groundskeeper was a hoarse-voiced, bad-tempered fellow named Dominic, always growling complaints about the headmaster, Father Justin Diny.
First Joe spent days weeding the formal gardens around the Archmere mansion. Next, he washed every window in the mansion itself, swabbing the glass with a rag soaked in vinegar and water, and drying it with newspaper. And then he painted the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the estate.
Tactfully, Archmere didn’t embarrass the work-study boys by making them work during the school year. That first morning in September, Joe dressed in the school uniform of jacket and tie, and packed his new fountain pen, pencils, and notebooks. The school bus carried him between the stone pillars at the entrance, where he noted the fresh black paint on the wrought-iron gates. Up at the mansion, he silently admired the gleaming windows.
Just inside the mansion was a foyer with marble pillars and a retractable stained-glass ceiling. Joe Biden, now a student at Archmere Academy, belonged in this magnificent place. With determination and a lot of hard work, he had made this dream come true.
“Ask What You Can Do for Your Country”
Joe Biden was thrilled to be attending Archmere. But he still wished he weren’t so short. At age fourteen, he was five foot one and barely weighed one hundred pounds. Only one boy in his class was smaller.
Worse, Joe’s stutter was more of a problem for him than ever. Archmere, a college preparatory school, expected its students to learn public speaking. It was one thing to memorize a paragraph to read aloud, as Joe had at Saint Helena’s. It was quite another to stand in front of 250 boys and deliver a five-minute speech. But that was a requirement at Archmere—every student had to take a turn giving a presentation at morning assembly.
Because of his stutter, Joe was excused from the speech requirement the first year. This made life easier for him in a way, but he knew that his fellow students all understood why he was the only boy to be excused. And these college prep boys were less kind and more competitive than his friends in grade school.
They nicknamed him “Joe Impedimenta,” using a word they’d learned in Latin class. They also called him “Dash,” meaning that he spoke like Morse code, dot-dot-dash. “They looked at me like I was stupid,” Joe Biden wrote later.
The teasing shamed Joe and filled him with rage. And he realized what a threat the stutter was to his ambitions. He intended to do great things with his life, but the stutter loomed as an impediment, a roadblock, on the way to achieving his aims.
Just look at Uncle Boo-Boo, who’d come from Scranton to live with the Bidens in Wilmington. Edward Blewitt Finnegan was a smart man, a college graduate who’d wanted to become a doctor. But because of his stutter, he was selling mattresses for a living.
As much as Joe loved Uncle Boo-Boo, he was afraid of ending up like him. Life had dealt both of them an unfair blow, saddling them with a stutter. But as Joseph Biden advised his children, “If you get knocked down, get up.”
So Joe worked hard at overcoming his impediment. He memorized long passages and practiced speaking in front
