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

Fortunately, Joe realized that the incident could turn nasty, and he quickly got his temper under control. He apologized for insulting the macho gang member by calling him a woman’s name. At the same time, Joe pointed out, everyone had to follow the pool rules.

Getting to know the other lifeguards at the pool was an education for Joe. He’d been aware that movie theaters in Wilmington were segregated by race, and he’d taken part in a couple of marches to desegregate them. In high school, Joe had walked out of the Charcoal Pit when they’d treated his Black teammate, Frank, unfairly. But now, for the first time, he was the only white guy in a group of Black men his own age.

As Joe worked with his fellow lifeguards, chatted with them, and played basketball with them, he felt almost like an exchange student in a foreign country. His new friends were college students, like him, but they attended Black colleges. He was the only white guy they knew, and they curiously asked him questions about his way of life.

In turn, Joe heard about how their lives were blighted by a constant stream of insults and injuries. They could be beaten up, for instance, for using the public drinking fountain in a white neighborhood. When they went to the movies, they had to sit in the “colored” section. Even though Joe had known about the movie theaters being segregated, it wasn’t until now that he truly saw how much it hurt his Black friends to be treated like second-class citizens.

Joe’s lifeguarding experience helped him understand how much was at stake in the ongoing civil rights struggle. The next year, in May 1963, Joe and other Americans around the country watched shocking scenes on the TV news. During a civil rights march in Birmingham, Alabama, police chief Bull Connor turned fire hoses and attack dogs on the young marchers. And Joe read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a powerful explanation of why the civil rights marches were necessary.

That same year, 1963, Joe took a trip to Washington, DC. He was especially eager to revisit the Capitol Building, where the US Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—met. This was where he planned to be someday, to do his part in national politics. Joe’s hero President Kennedy had first run for the office of senator from Massachusetts, and then, as senator, he had run for the highest office in the land.

At the massive white-domed building on Capitol Hill, Joe stepped into the Senate Chamber in the north wing. The Senate was not in session at the moment, and Joe had a chance to stare around the empty room. Along one wall, decorated with dark red marble pilasters, was the marble rostrum, and the chair where the presiding officer sat. Semicircular rows of desks, one desk for each of the hundred senators, faced the rostrum. All around the room on the second floor, a visitor’s gallery overlooked the scene.

This was the center of power. As Joe sank into the presiding officer’s chair, the thought gave him goose bumps. Here, senators hammered out laws that changed Americans’ lives for the better—or for the worse.

Joe’s ambitious musings were interrupted by the hand of a uniformed security guard on his back. Unescorted visitors, the man informed him, were not allowed in the Senate Chamber. The guard marched Joe down to a room in the basement of the Capitol. He questioned him severely before letting the starstruck young man go.

As a freshman at the University of Delaware, Joe had gone out for football again. He loved playing the game so much that he’d toyed with the idea of a pro football career. But after Joe’s first-semester grades came out, his parents told him he had to drop football.

Joseph Biden was especially worried that Joe was letting his grades slide. Joe Sr. was set on his oldest son becoming the first Biden to graduate from college. “Remember, Joey, you gotta be a college man,” he urged him. “They can never take your degree from you.”

So Joe gave up football after freshman year, but still he was only skating along on C grades. He was having too much fun. He was put on probation for one of his wilder stunts, spraying an RA (resident assistant) with a fire extinguisher.

And Joe spent many hours hanging around the dormitory lounge when he should have been studying instead. He argued with his friends about civil rights, about President Kennedy’s policy toward Cuba, about their own futures. Joe’s friend Fred Sears, who had also gone from Archmere Academy to the University of Delaware, assumed that Joe didn’t have a chance of getting into law school.

But at the beginning of his junior year, Joe woke up to an inconvenient fact. There was a direct connection between his grades and the next step in his master plan: becoming a lawyer. He had to improve his grade average. Fast.

Lovestruck and Law School

Finally getting serious about his college grades, Joe Biden went to a political science professor at the University of Delaware for advice. The professor told him bluntly that he had no chance of getting into law school unless he could achieve an excellent academic record for his last year and a half. So Joe moved off campus, away from the lively social life. After signing up for challenging courses, he studied all the time.

Not surprisingly, his grades shot up. By spring break in 1964, Joe felt confident enough about his progress to think about going out for football again. He even allowed himself to take a vacation in Florida.

Like throngs of other college students, Joe and his friend Fred Sears piled into a classmate’s car and headed for Fort Lauderdale, over a thousand miles away. But when they reached Fort Lauderdale, the beach scene wasn’t as much fun as Joe and Fred had hoped.