Posted on 01/21/2009 7:16:47 PM PST by Born Conservative
Joe Biden and Jim Kennedy stood out on what used to be Maloney Field in Green Ridge as a huge earthmover, with tires 5 feet tall, crawled along.
“Run under that, Joe,’” Jim Kennedy dared.
Joe Biden, 8 or 9 years old, scurried between the front and back tires, letting the front axle pass over him as the mover backed up.
He survived, unscarred.
“Jesus, what the hell did you do that for?” Jim Kennedy wailed.
If Joe Biden said anything, all Magisterial District Judge James Kennedy remembers decades later is the boy’s laughter and wanting to smush the youngster himself for accepting the dare.
“It horrified me,” said Judge Kennedy, 68. “I mean, he came that close to being killed. I went home and hid.”
Joe Biden never hid.
Oh, maybe during one of those hide-and-seek games the neighborhood kids played in the shells of all the new buildings going up on the campus of Marywood College in the 1950s. More likely, if anyone was looking for Joe Biden then, they might have found him swinging from ropes high above the ground or hopping across garage roofs.
“Joe Biden was fearless; nothing frightened him,” said Tom Bell, 65, of Abington Twp., whom Mr. Biden called “my oldest and greatest friend” when autographing a copy of his autobiography, “Promises to Keep.”
“I mean, nothing frightened him.”
‘Natural-born leader’
The vice president’s enduring Scranton friends still recognize the guy whose fearlessness underscored a persistent nature — born and nurtured in their midst, even as Scranton, once the 38th-largest city in the country by population, entered its decline.
They never suspected he might reach the heights he has. They knew him as the guy who once climbed a flaming culm dump. But they see how his daring childhood thrust him near the pinnacle of power.
On Tuesday, Justice John Paul Stevens swore in the Joe Biden they knew as the 47th vice president, only the second born in Pennsylvania.
For the first time, the job of backing up the most powerful man in the world belongs to a Scranton native.
“He was a natural-born leader,” Mr. Bell said.
Even in the 1940s and 1950s, when they all were young and neighborhood life brimmed with fun, his friends looked to Joe Biden to decide their day’s adventures.
He was English on his father’s side, Irish on his mother’s, and that brought occasional tension within the family, but he and his friends hardly noticed that as they floated through their childhoods in the city’s Green Ridge section.
Family roots
Back then, Green Ridge bloomed as the city’s first suburb. Electric trolleys, and later buses, that ran between there and downtown were known as the “Green Ridge Suburban.”
The large, seemingly ever-burgeoning families of Irish-Catholics — five kids in one, 10 in another, maybe more in some — were displacing the Protestants who first settled the section, Judge Kennedy said.
Green Ridge had its mansions, which symbolize its wealth to this day, but farther north on the other side of Electric Street was a more modest neighborhood of lawyers, doctors, engineers, salesmen and other professionals. They weren’t all rich — though some were — but they weren’t poor. Middle class definitely, maybe a bit more than that in attitude.
“They were well-employed people,” Judge Kennedy said. “Not wealthy, but they had good incomes.”
Ambrose J. Finnegan sold advertising for the former Scranton Tribune as his wife, born Geraldine Blewitt, tended to their five children. In May 1941, their only daughter, Catherine Eugenia, known as Jean, married the debonnaire Joseph Robinette Biden, whose family had arrived in Scranton in the 1930s.
The Biden family had gotten in on the ground floor of the American oil business. Joseph H. Biden hooked up with the family that started the American Oil Co., better known as Amoco, and arrived in Scranton in the early- to mid-1930s as the company’s local branch manager. He and his wife had three children, including Joseph Robinette Sr.
By the time future Delaware Senator and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was born Nov. 20, 1942, Joseph R. Biden Sr. and his wife, Jean, were staying with her parents at 2446 N. Washington Ave.
The elder Mr. Biden was out of town on business when his son was born, and a neighbor, Tom Phillips, a reporter at The Tribune, drove Mrs. Biden to Mercy Hospital for the birth.
Taken away by work
The Bidens did not stay in Scranton. By the end of World War II, the future vice president was 3 years old, and the Bidens were “living comfortably in a nice house in the Boston suburbs,” he wrote in his book. The Bidens moved because the elder Mr. Biden had taken a well-paying job in a cousin’s company that manufactured a sealant for merchant marine ships.
The cousin, Bill Sheen Jr., and Joseph R. Biden Sr. lived the high life, flying private planes, hunting elk. Eventually, the business failed and senior’s tries at running a furniture store in downtown Boston and a crop-dusting business on Long Island, N.Y,. failed.
“By the time I was ready to start school in 1947, we were back in Scranton — and broke,” Vice President Biden wrote.
They were back, crammed into the modest, three-story home at 2446 N. Washington. The Bidens lived there with the Finnegans and two other Finnegan children, Gertrude and Edward. Eventually three more Biden siblings, Valerie, James and Frank, came along.
Joseph Biden Sr., who had a hard time finding work in Scranton, sometimes worked out of town. For a year, he cleaned furnaces in Wilmington during the week, and returned home on weekends, the vice president wrote.
“A lot of people from Scranton left Scranton to work,” Mr. Bell said. “Some of them stayed away, and moved away as the Bidens did at one point. Others just went away, and the husbands came home on weekends.
“I recall very clearly when he (the elder Mr. Biden) would be coming home Friday afternoon; Mrs. Biden would throw everybody out of the house and she would straighten the whole house up, then she herself would get all dolled up,” Mr. Bell said.
Sports proved his mettle
The Bidens enrolled their oldest child, the future Delaware senator and vice president, at St. Paul’s School just a couple of blocks from home. The boy was a good athlete.
Judge Kennedy, whose home’s backyard on Dimmick Avenue faced the Finnegans’ backyard, learned about the athleticism in his first encounter with a scrawny, shirtless kid with short pants and hair, but fairly hairy arms and a stutter.
“You ca-ca-can’t catch me,” challenged little Joe Biden, who was probably about kindergarten age.
“And he was right,” said Judge Kennedy, more than two years older. “He could change directions, and he was fast.”
Mr. Biden played on the Nu Car Dealers team when the Green Ridge Little League was founded in 1951.
His father was a team assistant coach and is listed as a league incorporator. William Kotzwinkle, who wrote the novelization of “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” played in the same league.
In his book, Mr. Biden said sports boosted confidence, despite his stutter.
“Sports was as natural to me as speaking was unnatural,” he wrote. “And sports turned out to be my ticket to acceptance — and more. I wasn’t easily intimidated in a game, so even when I stuttered, I was always the kid who said, ‘Give me the ball.’ ”
Tackle football games often played out in the dirt-and-gravel alley behind the Finnegan home. Mr. Biden’s small size appeared to be a drawback.
“They would say, ‘What are you picking him for?’ because he’s like the runt,” Judge Kennedy said.
“(I’d say) ‘You’ll see why we’re picking him.’ ... He was relentless. ... He was competing with bigger guys, but he wouldn’t lay down. He would get the bloodiest, and the dirtiest.”
Fond Scranton memories
Mr. Biden had a childhood disease that cost him much of one year of elementary school, which led to a repeat of fourth grade, Mr. Bell said. The second year of fourth grade was spent at Cooper Elementary School, he said.
According to a 1951 city directory, Mr. Biden’s father at one point worked as a salesman for the Scranton Plate Glass Co., but within two years the family had moved to Wilmington where the elder Mr. Biden sold cars and later real estate.
Scranton had not seen the last of the Bidens.
Most Fridays, the vice president wrote, they would pack up the kids for weekend visits to the Finnegans. Mr. Biden also spent most summers in Scranton with his grandparents up until 10th grade.
“I’d have Saturdays to play with my old friends from the neighborhood — baseball, basketball, cops and robbers. Between games, we’d head down toward Green Ridge Corners, stopping in at (the) Handy Dandy (store) for caps for our cap guns, or to Pappsy’s or Simmey’s for penny candy,” Mr. Biden wrote.
Afterward, it was on to the Roosevelt Theater at 1825 Sanderson Ave. for “the 12-cent double feature, usually a pair of westerns (starring cowboy actor Lash LaRue) or Tarzan.”
“We would leave the Roosie, and if we would see a Lash LaRue movie or a Tarzan movie, we would act out the players on the way home,” Mr. Bell said. “Along the banks of the Lackawanna River, there would be these Lomax trees growing ... They don’t grow too high, but it’s springy. (They would grab the branches) and we would leap from tree to tree.”
On Richmont Street, residential car garages were built close enough together that Mr. Biden and Mr. Bell literally leapt from garage roof to garage roof.
“Ground’s the swamp, touch it and you die, eaten by alligators!” they shouted, Mr. Biden wrote. The others in their group, Larry Orr and Charlie Roth, tagged along, but “usually took their chances with the alligators.”
Promises always kept
Mr. Roth was one of Mr. Biden’s closest friends, Mr. Bell said.
“Charlie would always set me competing against Joe,” Mr. Bell said. “He was more of an instigator; he would get things going.”
When Mr. Biden was about 10, as Marywood University’s auditorium was under construction, workmen left heavy, hemp ropes hanging from exposed steel girders. On Mr. Roth’s dare, Mr. Biden climbed up on a girder, 50 or 60 feet in the air, and grabbed the rope.
“He swang way out over the seating area, like a Tarzan thing,” said Mr. Bell, who grudgingly joined the fun when Mr. Roth needled him.
Another time, Mr. Roth promised to pay Mr. Biden $5 to reach the top of a burning culm dump. Culm, a remnant of mining laden with smaller bits of coal, regularly caught fire, polluting the Lackawanna Valley air.
Mr. Biden weaved his way among the sizzing pockets and reached the top. Mr. Roth paid only years later, and Mr. Biden framed the $5 bill and it hung in his Washington Senate office, Mr. Bell said.
On Sundays, the family went to St. Paul’s Church, and in the afternoon politics and sports dominated the male conversation at the kitchen table. Ambrose Finnegan’s grandson sat in the corner listening. It is where he learned his “foundational principle” in politics, he wrote.
“He (Ambrose Finnegan) wanted me to understand two big things: First, that nobody, no group is above others,” Mr. Biden wrote. “And second, that politics was a matter of personal honor. A man’s word is his bond. You give your word, you keep it.”
Perhaps that explains one of his most publicized return visits to Scranton. In November 1972, days after his first election as one of Delaware’s U.S. senators, Judge Kennedy convinced him to speak to the Friends Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County’s 1973 dinner.
“Put it in the bank, Jimmy, I’ll be there,” Mr. Biden said, according to the judge.
A month later, Mr. Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, died in a car accident. For weeks, Mr. Biden isolated himself, shutting out even his childhood friends. But when it came time to fulfill the promise to his friend, he did.
True affection for Scranton
They didn’t see each other as much after Mr. Biden hit 10th grade. College, girlfriends, wives and family intervened, though Mr. Biden says he visited at least once a year since his family moved away.
Since his election as Delaware’s senator, Mr. Biden publicly visited Scranton at least 21 times, usually for speaking engagements or to campaign for himself or other presidential, statewide or local candidates. That included an unpublicized visit to eulogize Mr. Roth, who had a troubled life and died in September 2000 at age 57.
He always kept in touch with his closest friends, Mr. Bell, Mr. Roth, Mr. Orr and Judge Kennedy, and invited them to his most important life events, his weddings, the announcement of his presidential campaigns and his mother’s 90th birthday party.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden alluded to his native city in speeches the day he was announced as Mr. Obama’s running mate at the Democratic National Convention and at numerous campaign appearances. The attention thrust the city into the national spotlight as a symbol of working-class America, though Mr. Biden’s family was more middle class than anything.
Scranton became a political symbol that Mr. Biden helped fashion. His friends say his affection for the city of his childhood is genuine, citing his frequent returns and the way he always touches base with his old friends, whom he fawns over in social settings in Washington.
“Without question, and it’s almost hard to understand it and hard to believe. You think it’s an opportunist thing, but it’s not. The guy’s that way. He’s always been. Before he was even in the limelight,” Mr Bell said. “He flatters me. He thinks a great deal of me, and he thinks a great deal of Scranton. Scranton people, Scranton values, Scranton. It’s not an imitation and it’s not fake.”
Plugs is a psychotic.
Biden is Michael from “The Office”.
Joe Biden:
Not too bright then,
not too bright now.
Psychotic AND clueless.
Idiot then, idiot now!
How interesting. Here in California, we spell it “scrotum”.
That and his crack is where his hair transplants come from.
Actually, there is an exit on I-80 in the Poconos, about 45 minutes (?) south of Scranton for a town called "Scotrun". I always do a double-take when I see it, thinking it says "Scrotum".
Ping
Geez, he and Gore must smoke the same stuff.
My grandparents and mother were born in Scranton, PA. They were hard working Welsh.The finest people to ever come out of that city. Joe creeps me out.
Kind of nauseating.
By the way, that was, and I hope it was obvious, an editorial comment on our new Vice President, not on the good folks of Scranton.
And having just read that first story, I guess we can rule out Alzheimer’s or the tumor as an excuse. He’s always been that messed up.
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