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

The two friends learned that a round-trip plane ride to Nassau, a resort town in the Bahamas, was only twenty-eight dollars. Without thinking it over much, they bought tickets and hopped on the plane. Joe and Fred had no money for a hotel. But they quickly found other college guys with a Nassau apartment and paid them a few dollars to sleep on their floor.

Then Joe and Fred headed for the public beach. A chain-link fence divided it from a private beach belonging to an expensive hotel. And the private beach was full of attractive young women.

On the fence separating Joe and Fred from the young women, they noticed some beach towels with the hotel’s logo. They grabbed the towels, wrapped them around their waists, and strolled in the front door of the hotel as if they belonged there. No one stopped them, so they walked on through the hotel to the private beach.

There Joe spotted a girl so gorgeous that he knew he had to meet her. Fred saw her too, but Joe, quicker and more determined, got to her lounge chair first. “Hi, I’m Joe Biden.”

She looked up at the guy with the dazzling smile and said, “Hi, Joe. I’m Neilia Hunter.”

Joe and Neilia fell madly in love. They spent the next four days together, talking and talking. She found out that he intended to become a politician and do great things for the country. He found out that she understood a lot about politics.

Neilia lived in Skaneateles, a town in the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York. She was a senior at Syracuse University, just north of Skaneateles. She loved working with kids, and she was going to start teaching next fall.

By the time Joe joined Fred on the plane back to Fort Lauderdale, Joe was sure that he would marry Neilia. He’d planned exactly how he would do it: He would study hard during his senior year, in order to get into Syracuse University’s law school after graduation. Meanwhile, starting the following weekend, he’d drive from Wilmington to Syracuse and spend every spare moment each weekend with Neilia.

The next person Joe told about Neilia was his sister, Valerie, then a freshman at the University of Delaware. Back in Wilmington, he burst into the Bidens’ house and ran up the stairs yelling, “Val!”

Valerie was talking to a friend on the phone, but she hung up. Joe blurted out, “I met the girl I’m going to marry!” Valerie had double-dated with her brother since high school days, and she knew immediately that this new girlfriend was something different.

Neilia, back in her hometown of Skaneateles, was a little more cautious when she called her college roommate, Bobbie. But she couldn’t hide her excitement about this amazing guy, Joe Biden. “Do you know what he’s going to be? He’s going to be a senator by age thirty and president of the United States!” As Bobbie could tell, Neilia was “completely over the moon” about Joe.

The first weekend, Joe showed up at Neilia’s house driving a flashy turquoise convertible from his father’s used-car lot. Bobbie and the rest of their friends were impressed, with Joe as well as the car. Over the coming months, Neilia’s parents got to know Joe. They were impressed too, although Neilia’s father was uneasy about the fact that Joe was Catholic.

When Joe took Neilia to Wilmington to meet his family, the Bidens threw a big barbecue, inviting all their friends. Neilia fit in as if she belonged, and everyone, especially Val, loved her. Valerie was planning to be a teacher, like Neilia, and they had a lot in common.

Meanwhile, with Joe’s life goals clearer than ever, football didn’t seem so important. He informed his football coach that he was not going to try out for the varsity team his senior year. Instead Joe studied even harder.

In spite of spending every weekend with Neilia, driving back and forth from Wilmington to Syracuse, 270 miles each way, he did pull his grades up. At the end of the spring semester in 1965, Joe graduated from the University of Delaware with a BA degree in history and political science. And the Syracuse University law school, noting his improved grade average, his decent score on the Law School Admission Test, and the letters of recommendation from his professors, admitted Joseph R. Biden Jr. He would begin in September.

His next problem was how to pay for law school, which was going to cost $3,000 more than he had saved. Joe’s parents couldn’t pay the whole cost; they were still supporting Valerie, Jimmy, and Frank. But Joe received scholarships to make up the rest of the tuition fees. To pay for room and board, he got a job at Syracuse University as a resident advisor, living in a dormitory with undergraduate students.

At law school, Joe quickly took to the social life. He spent most of his free time with Neilia, as he’d planned, and they gathered a group of friends around them. One of the first classmates Joe met, who became a close friend, was Jack Owens.

Jack wasn’t dating anyone in particular, and Joe and Neilia agreed that Jack would be the perfect match for Valerie Biden. They wanted everyone, especially these two special people, to be as happy as they were. However, when they managed to lure Valerie up from the University of Delaware to meet Jack, the two could hardly stand each other, even for one evening. The Valerie-Jack match would have to wait almost ten more years.

Joe now felt wistful about missing out on varsity football during his senior year of college. So at Syracuse, he used his leadership skills to organize an intramural team of law school students. He quarterbacked them, his teammates kidded him, as if they were in the Olympics.

By now Joe Biden had his stuttering problem well under control, although it would be there in the background for the rest of his life.