Joe Biden by Beatrice Gormley (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

that he was too young to make such a decision. Another ambition popped up around the same time: Joey wrote in a paper for school that when he grew up, he wanted to be president of the United States. Of course, as he remarked years later, so did a lot of other twelve-year-olds.

Meanwhile, Joey was more and more aware that his stutter was holding him back. Not in sports, where he didn’t need to talk much, and not with his friends, where he was relaxed. Besides, his friends at Saint Helena’s were being raised, as he was, to be respectful. They would never tease a person about their physical disability or their unlucky circumstances in life.

But with adults Joey didn’t know well, or when he felt as if he were onstage, he tensed up and stuttered. He had a paper route in Mayfield, and every Saturday he had to go around and collect subscription money from his customers. To avoid stumbling over words, he rehearsed each conversation. Since his next-door neighbor, Mr. Walsh, was a Yankees fan, Joey would check the baseball box scores before he knocked on the door. He’d be ready to say, “D’ja see Mantle hit two homers yesterday?”

At school, the most unnerving times were when Joey had to recite or read aloud. He prepared himself for this even more intensely. Luckily for him, the students were seated in rows alphabetically by last name. Since young Biden was always in the first row, he could figure out which passages in the textbook he might have to read aloud. He memorized these passages and practiced a rhythm of speaking that avoided tripping up his tongue.

One day Joey had prepared himself to read, “Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentleman. He took off his cloak and laid it over the mud so the lady would not dirty her shoes.” Sure enough, the teacher called on him to read that passage.

Joey started off confidently, but then the teacher interrupted him in the middle of the first sentence, throwing him off his stride. She asked him to repeat one of the words. Joey started again, but his rhythm was broken. He began to stutter.

The teacher imitated his speech: “Mr. Bu-Bu-Bu-Bu-Biden…”

Joey couldn’t believe it. Up until now, his teachers had tried to help him overcome his stutter. But this nun was actually making fun of his disability. In front of the whole class.

“I could feel a white heat come up through my legs and the back of my neck,” Joe Biden wrote years later. “It was pure rage. I got up from my desk and walked out of the classroom, right past the nun.” He stalked out of the school and kept walking for two miles, all the way home.

Saint Helena’s telephoned Jean Biden to let her know that Joey had left the school, but not why. So Joey’s mother was waiting for him, shocked and angry—at her son. After ordering Joey into the car along with his littlest brother, Frankie, she drove back toward the school. “Joey,” she asked grimly, “what happened?”

“Mom, she made fun of me,” he answered. “She called me ‘Mr. Bu-Bu-Bu-Bu-Biden.’ ”

Jean Biden deeply respected the Catholic Church and its nuns and priests, and she brought her children up to have the same respect. But this day she marched into the school, sat Joey down outside the principal’s office with toddler Frankie on his lap, marched into the office, and demanded to see Joey’s teacher.

The teacher, dressed in her usual nun’s habit and bonnet, was called to the office. At first, she tried to deny that she’d said anything out of line. But Joey’s mother insisted on a straight answer: Had she mocked Joey’s stutter?

“Yes, Mrs. Biden,” said the nun defensively. “I was making a point.”

At that, Joe Biden wrote later, “I could see my mother pull herself up to her full height, five foot one.” Jean Biden stepped up to the nun and said, “If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head. Do you understand me?”

Although Wilmington was several hours’ drive from the Bidens’ old home in Scranton, the distance didn’t keep them away from Grandpop Finnegan’s house in Green Ridge. Joe and Jean Biden, with Joey, Valerie, Jimmy, and eventually baby Frankie, drove up to Scranton for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for birthdays, for summer vacations. Joey’s old neighborhood pals saw him so often that some of them didn’t realize he’d moved away.

And the boys would still go off together for the same kinds of fun. One summer Sunday in Scranton, when Joey and Charlie, Tommy, and Larry were twelve or thirteen, the boys started a water balloon fight. They were up on a ledge, with the road down below.

Spotting a young man driving by in an open convertible, his arm around his girlfriend, Joey shouted, “Let ’em have it!” The first balloon hit the hood of the car. The second one landed right in the front seat, next to the girl.

The driver jumped out of the car, wet and furious, and took off after the boys. “This guy would not give up,” said Larry Orr years later. The driver chased them all the way to the next town, Dunmore. The boys managed to shake him, finally, by hiding behind tombstones in a cemetery.

One of the first and most lasting values Joey learned, growing up, was family loyalty. He was supposed to watch out for his sister and brothers, and they were supposed to watch out for him. “You’re closer to one another than you are to your dad and me,” his mother told them. In a tough choice, family came first.

A tough choice for Joey came when he had the job of keeping order on the school bus. Joey was proud of being chosen for safety patrol, and of wearing his blue badge. But one day it was Val, as he called his sister, who misbehaved on the bus. He was supposed to report