WILMINGTON, Delaware — Joe Biden, 77, projected modesty and his “middle-class Joe” persona during the dedication of an Amtrak rail station in Wilmington that bears his name.
“The truth is, I don’t deserve this — unless you reward longevity,” the then-vice president said at the 2011 ceremony.
In Delaware, Biden isn’t associated with being middle class. He’s better known as “Uncle Joe.” And sites that bear the former vice president’s name reinforce that lore, reflecting the homeboy, regular guy bona fides that the top-tier Democratic presidential candidate has worked hard to maintain through his near half-century in public life.
The Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station recognizes the estimated 8,000 trips Biden took between Wilmington and Washington during his 36-year Senate career. After his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972, Biden made the effort to be present as his sons, Hunter and Beau, grew up, traveling back each night from Washington on the train.
At the end of his tenure as vice president, Biden returned to Wilmington on an Amtrak train and was greeted by a robust welcoming committee in the station.
Visitors might have no way to know of Biden’s personal connection to the station aside from plaques near the station entrances and lettering on the doors showing his name.
Panels commemorating 45 years of Amtrak and its contribution to Delaware’s economy picture Delaware’s current top statewide elected officials, Sens. Chris Coons and Tom Carper and Gov. John Carney, all Democrats, but not Biden. Another educational display in the station covers railway history and architecture.
Those traveling by vehicle are more likely to visit the Biden Welcome Center, a rest stop a few miles north of the Maryland-Delaware state line on Interstate Highway 95. It was named after the Biden family in 2018 by a state resolution following its restoration.
“Though the family members’ work takes them around the globe, they continue to call Delaware home, from the rolling hills of the Brandywine Valley to the rich history of the capital region to the sun-soaked serenity of the beaches,” a plaque explaining the name reads.
Banners advertising a Delaware casino hang from a domed ceiling above tables where patrons can enjoy quick bites from restaurants like Panda Express, Popeye’s, and Pret a Manger. In the bathrooms, signs over air hand dryers informing that the building is “an environmentally friendly ‘Green’ building” have letters missing and rewritten in fading black sharpie.
“There’s a lot of broken toilets,” one woman complained.
Several patrons hardly noticed the name of the building, while others chuckled at realizing that the rest stop bears the name of the former vice president and 2020 Democratic front-runner.
“I was just laughing as I was coming in,” said one man, a supporter of President Trump traveling to West Virginia who did not want to be named. “I go, holy shit, this is for Biden? Are they going to change it when they lock his ass up?”
Michelle Clark, a manager working at a convenience store in the center, said that visitors joke she should call Biden up and ask him to come to the building. “I like him,” she said, before noting “we can’t be political or anything.”
In the summer of 1962, when Biden was 19, he took a job as the only white lifeguard at the pool in a predominantly black neighborhood in order to learn more about the black community. “Most of the people I got to know there had literally never talked to a white person,” Biden wrote in his 2007 book, Promises to Keep.
The city renamed the pool the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Aquatic Center in recognition of how Biden’s career accomplishments “can all be traced back to his time as a lifeguard at Price’s Run pool — a period during which a young man began to learn about people and about how to lead and serve.”
At the dedication of the pool in 2017, after his time as vice president, Biden recalled his interactions with children at the pool and with gang leader “Corn Pop” — moments that reemerged as viral sensations this year during his presidential campaign.
“The kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down so it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again,” Biden said.
One day, Corn Pop waited outside his car “with three guys and straight razors” after Biden called him “Esther Williams,” the name of a competitive swimmer and actress, when scolding Corn Pop for bouncing on a diving board.
Biden prepared himself for the confrontation by wrapping a six-foot chain around his arm, but before violence could ensue, Biden apologized to Corn Pop for calling him Esther Williams. Corn Pop and his gang looked out for Biden the rest of the summer, he said.
“My opinion of Joe Biden is different than the younger voters today because I remember Joe Biden going all the way back to like the Vietnam War period and civil rights period,” Stephen LeBow said at the Biden Welcome Center on his way from New York to Florida. “The younger generation, even though it may be 30 or whatever, they only remember him from Obama.”
A large vice presidential seal sits next to Biden’s name on the side of the pool house — a relatively new building, not the original from Biden’s time as a lifeguard. The pool is under construction, being fixed with new filters and jets, among other improvements.
The communal sites stand in contrast to Biden’s own neighborhood in Delaware: Greenville, an upscale community outside Wilmington.
At least six Mercedes-Benz cars sat in the parking lot outside the Walgreens that Biden frequents, located in the same shopping center as the Jos A. Bank where he used to buy suits.
In the same neighborhood, behind a security gate, sits a house that former MBNA bank executive John Cochran bought from Biden in 1996 for the full $1.2 million asking price, even though homes were selling for $100,000 to $200,000 less than the asking price at that time.
Though Biden stresses his middle-class upbringing, his ambition to reach the upper echelons of politics was apparent from early in his career.
“Joe drank from that Kool-Aid at the very beginning, to think that he could be a great president someday,” said Sam Waltz, a Delaware-based consultant and former newspaper reporter who has known the Bidens for 40 years.
The travel stop and swimming pool were named near the end or after Biden’s tenure as vice president, perhaps a sign that the community did not expect Biden, at 77, to seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
In the same December 2016 City Council meeting that approved the pool’s name change, local lawmakers approved a resolution to name a bridge after President Barack Obama, noting that the end of his term was near.
Naming public places after politicians still in office comes with the risk of honoring an individual whose image may be tarnished in the future.
“The worst fear of Delawareans is that Joe could embarrass himself, and by extension embarrass Delaware,” Waltz said.
In 1976, following President Richard Nixon’s resignation, lawmakers in California quietly removed his name from a freeway that had been named for him in 1971. Some communities refrain from naming places after living individuals at all.
“It was more timing of the welcome center renovation itself than any external factors,” said Democratic Delaware state Rep. Paul Baumbach, a co-sponsor of the resolution to name the travel stop. He pointed out that the renaming effort was bipartisan, stating that Biden is “beloved” in the state “across the aisle.”
“That’s part of the approach that the Biden center on the University of Delaware campus is focused on, making sure that communication within our country is facilitated,” Baumbach said.
Biden’s alma mater, the University of Delaware, changed the name of its public policy department to the Biden School in 2018. In 2017, he started the Biden Institute, a privately funded policy center on the university’s campus.
“I hope what happens at this school is that we change the tone: We become more civil; we become more polite,” Biden said at the school’s renaming ceremony.
The school is perhaps a conventional namesake expected for a former vice president. Delaware enthusiasm for putting Biden’s name on run-of-the-mill locations, and Biden’s embrace of the dedications, stands in contrast to national naming disputes.
Amid a push in 2001 to rename the Casper, Wyoming, high school football field after Vice President Dick Cheney, an alumnus of the school, Casper Mayor Paul Bertoglio asserted that Cheney’s “stature is above having an athletic field named after him.” The name change eventually went through.
It also reflects Biden’s influence on the state of fewer than 1 million people as the highest-ranking public official ever from Delaware.
At a fundraiser in Wilmington last week, Biden shed tears, explaining that he was a “little emotional” being back among those who stood by him when there was a “target” on him early in his campaign.
National criticism of Biden’s unwanted touching, verbal slip-ups, and work against nationally mandated desegregation busing has less of an effect on Biden’s personal brand in Delaware.
“It’s a state where people are dated, mated, or related,” Waltz said, which “tends to allow a buffer for eccentricity and/or peculiarity” that could be less forgivable in a different type of community.
