Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Pittsburgh Monday to address a strongly union crowd at the Allegheny County Labor Day Parade. In doing so, Biden also traveled through time, decades into the past to an era when organized labor ruled the Democratic Party and shaped the careers of politicians like the young Joe Biden.

“The only reason I’m standing here is back in 1972, I was a 29-year-old kid, and Richard Nixon ended up winning my state by about 70 percent of the vote,” the vice president told the crowd, reminiscing about his first run for Senate in neighboring Delaware. “I couldn’t get help anywhere. And I was working like the devil, and there was a big old boy named Emory Woodard, he was about six-foot-six, about 260 pounds. He represented the steelworkers at what used to be called Worth Steel in Claymont, where I moved from Scranton, to Claymont, Delaware.”