The memory is still vivid of that night in 1972. After taking a final exam, she was in a parking lot at the University of Delaware when news came over the car radio that the wife and 13-month-old daughter of Joe Biden, the state’s newly elected senator, had been killed in a car wreck.
“I turned off the ignition of the car and sat there and said a prayer,” said Jill Biden, now 57.
Certainly on that tragic night, there were no foreshadows that the 21-year-old English student would end up marrying the widower senator who was nine years older, raise his two young sons who survived the accident and their daughter born after the marriage, and now be campaigning for him to become Barack Obama’s vice president.
Amid this historic election featuring Republicans John McCain, an Arizona senator and former POW; Sarah Palin, Alaska’s governor who could be the first female vice president; and Obama, who could become the first black president, there is also the unlikely love story of Joe and Jill Biden.
After 32 years of marriage, Biden introduces his wife at campaign stops as “drop-dead gorgeous” and brags about her doctorate and career as a college professor.
“I married him. I married the boys. I married the state of Delaware,” she said, recalling that she was 25 at the time. “It was a little daunting.”
Joe Biden had met his first wife, Nelia Hunter Biden, during spring break in the Bahamas in 1964, and they married two years later. After Joe graduated from law school and began to practice, they had three children: Joseph III, called Beau, was born in 1969; Hunter was born in 1970; and Naomi, called Amy, was born in 1971.
Biden ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972 and won in a close election. Only a month or so later, his wife and children went out to buy a Christmas tree and a tractor-trailer rammed their station wagon. The mother and daughter were killed instantly, and the toddler boys spent months in a hospital.
That January, Joe Biden was sworn in while in his sons’ hospital room.
Her 2nd marriage as well
Meanwhile, Jill Jacobs, the oldest of five daughters of Donald and Bonnie Jacobs of Willow Grove, Pa., was on her own roller coaster. She had married another University of Delaware student but was divorced during their junior year. An English major, she then took a year off from college. When she returned to school, she became friends with Frank Biden, the younger brother of Delaware’s junior senator.
Frank arranged a date between Jill and Joe. At the time, Jill was also doing some modeling, and Joe had seen her picture on a poster.
“I went out with him because I was curious,” she remembered. “I never dreamed that I would be interested in someone who seemed so much older.”
Her first impression was “he dressed a lot better” than her usual dates, she said.
They went to see a movie. “We really hit it off,” Jill said.
On their second date, they saw another movie. But soon, “we dated a lot with the boys. They went with us everywhere,” she said. Indeed, Beau and Hunter eventually cornered their dad and declared it was time to marry Jill. The elder Biden did the proposing for them all, and eventually Jill accepted.
On June 17, 1977, they were married at the United Nations Chapel in New York City. Beau and Hunter attended the ceremony and went on the honeymoon, too.
Jill Biden gave up her job teaching high-school English to stay home with the boys. Their daughter, Ashley, was born in 1981.
Sen. Biden commuted daily by train, a trip that would become a career trademark: taking Amtrak from his Delaware house to Capitol Hill each day and back that night.
Back to teaching
As the kids grew older, Jill Biden yearned to return to the classroom and resumed teaching high-school English.
She also returned to school to earn first a master’s degree in English and later a Ph.D. in education. She started teaching English at Delaware Technical and Community College.
If she could manage it, Jill Biden said she would like to keep teaching — at least part time — if her husband is elected vice president.
“I always said that I’m nonpolitical,” she said. But facing community-college students, she sees their problems.
“My classroom is a microcosm” of American life, she explained. So she often provides a “view of what’s going on out there” to her political husband.
“He depends on my judgment.”
