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

of his bedroom mirror. Watching closely, he tried to keep his jaw muscles from clenching. If he saw his face tightening up, he’d pause, smile, try to relax his facial muscles, and then go on.

Joe was willing to try anything that might help him conquer his stutter. He’d heard the story of Demosthenes, a famous orator of ancient Greece. Demosthenes, too, had grown up with a bad stutter. He’d conquered it by practicing speeches on the seashore, with pebbles in his mouth.

Mayfield wasn’t near the ocean and its pebbles, but a neighbor of the Bidens happened to have a pebbled path. Helping himself to a handful, Joe put them in his mouth and tried to project his voice off a brick wall. “I nearly swallowed half the pebbles,” he wrote later. And it didn’t help his stutter.

In spite of his struggles, or maybe because of them, Archmere was the right place for Joe Biden. In his first two years, he grew a whole foot. He’d been a fierce athlete even when he was short, but with his new size he became one of the best players on the football team, the Archers. He was fast, and he was amazingly good at catching a football. His team members gave him a new and much better nickname, “Hands,” for his skill at catching passes.

Joe also had something maybe even more valuable than size or skill: a winning attitude. “He always had confidence, or made everybody believe he had confidence,” said his teammate Tom Lewis. “He’d never shy from a confrontation.”

Joe continued to work on his stutter, encouraged by his teachers and especially by his mother, his biggest booster. He also had the sympathy of Uncle Boo-Boo, who understood exactly how Joe felt. But Joe could see that his uncle used his stutter as a crutch, an excuse for never doing much with his life.

When Joe was a sophomore at Archmere, he finally stood up in front of morning assembly and gave the required five-minute speech. “No excuses, no exemptions, just like everybody else,” he wrote proudly years afterward.

Now that his stutter was under control, Joe discovered that he liked to talk. In fact, he had a natural “gift of gab,” as the Irish expression goes. And he had a lot he wanted to talk about.

Joe was earning Bs at Archmere and was learning a great deal, especially in politics and history. He could talk and talk about these subjects, so much that his classmates teased him.

Joe’s interest in politics went back to the lively discussions around Grandpop Finnegan’s kitchen table in Scranton. And in the Biden household in Wilmington, Joe’s father expected his children to be informed about public affairs. At dinner table discussions, Joseph often brought up big topics: equality, justice, the horrors of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Uncle Boo-Boo made Joe read the New York Times editorial page, and he argued politics with Joe and his friends. One time he drove Joe and Val to Washington, DC, to see the Capitol, where the United States Congress met. Joe’s uncle even introduced them to an actual US senator, Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

In Joe’s last two years at Archmere, his social life blossomed. Outgoing and friendly, he was popular with girls, and now he didn’t have to worry about stuttering when he asked them out. He and his friends went to high school dances at the DuPont Country Club and met each other at the Charcoal Pit for hamburgers and jukebox music. His girlfriend at that time was Maureen Masterson, a few years younger than Joe. Maureen attended Ursuline Academy, a Catholic girls’ school, where Valerie Biden was her best friend.

More than ever, Joe was a natural leader. Others were drawn to him by his confidence and his upbeat attitude. His leadership style was to make everyone feel included, especially those who might be left out. He’d notice a younger boy who was being teased and deliberately invite him to come along with Joe and his friends.

For Joe’s senior year at Archmere, 1960–61, the football team had a new coach, John Walsh. The Archmere Archers had been winning less than one game per year for the last twelve years. As Walsh put his new team through practice sessions, he chose Joe Biden and his teammate Mike Fay as halfbacks.

The coach knew that Joe wanted very much to be team captain, but he tapped Mike instead. However, the coach was impressed with Joe’s reaction: he accepted the coach’s decision, and he didn’t sulk. He just kept on playing his best for the team.

Shaped into a tightly bonded unit by Coach Walsh, the Archers began the season by winning their first game. Then they won their second game, and their third, and so on through the season. Halfback Joe Biden was the leading scorer. Whatever the situation on the field, he had a detailed idea of how he could make a touchdown. And his favorite four words were still, “Give me the ball.”

Racial Segregation

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southern states began to pass laws against racial integration. The mingling of Black people with white people—in schools, on trains and streetcars, in theaters, in restaurants, on beaches—was forbidden. In 1896 these laws were challenged in the courts. But the Supreme Court ruled that separating Black people and white people in public places was legal, as long as the accommodations for each race were equal. This ruling officially began the “Jim Crow” period, in which segregation was the law across the South.

However, the “equal” part of the Supreme Court’s ruling was never enforced. The separate restrooms, drinking fountains, and especially the schools for Blacks were inferior or even nonexistent. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that separating Black children and white children in the public schools was unconstitutional, and therefore illegal.

But many school systems, especially in the South, were very slow to begin desegregating. And the federal government, with Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, did not enforce the court’s ruling. Schools remained segregated,