WASHINGTON — Jill Biden was teaching in a locked psychiatric unit at the Rockford Center in Delaware when one of her teenage students started spiraling out of control. He was on his feet, aggressive and abusive. In back of the class, a burly aide sprang up, ready to intervene. Biden shot him a look that said, "Wait."
In just a few moments, the situation was defused without disruption or force.
"She was able to talk that kid back into the appropriate behavior, and she did it by conveying that she understood how he was feeling," said Dana Garrett, the aide, who vividly remembers the incident two decades ago. "She didn't have an air of status about her. Someone else had to tell me she was the wife of the senator."
Now that Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) is set to become the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate, the nation will be getting to know the wife of the senator.
As Jill Tracy Jacobs Biden rises to the national stage, friends and colleagues describe a woman who over three decades has carved out a life that is based not on her husband's career but on her commitment to teaching, to her family and to the causes of healthcare, education and military families.
Those close to the 57-year-old describe a natural leader who avoids the spotlight but is comfortable in its glare. Yet she will stand in the local supermarket to solicit donations for military families or load a station wagon full of books and deliver them, without publicity, to New Orleans schools depleted by Hurricane Katrina.
"People love her," said Allan Loudell, the host of Delaware's WDEL radio station and a seasoned observer of the state's political scene.
And whereas the senator attracts passionate supporters and detractors alike, when it comes to Jill Biden, "I've never heard a negative, not from politicos, not from anybody," Loudell said.
Jill Biden grew up in Willow Grove, Pa., the oldest of four sisters raised by a homemaker mother and a banker father. She took her first job at age 15, telling a Delaware newspaper in 2007, "I wanted my own money, my own identity, my own career."
Balancing that autonomous streak with the life of a political spouse gave her pause: Biden had to propose five times before she agreed to marry him.
He had been struck by her photo, before his brother arranged a blind date for them in 1975. Biden's first wife and baby daughter had died in a car accident three years earlier, leaving him a widower with two young boys.
