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s he made his way to the deck of the swimming pool, Joe Biden noticed the blonde woman sitting in a chaise lounge chair.

He wasn’t supposed to be there, at the British Colonial Hotel in Nassau, Bahamas. The out-of-place college student had snuck in with two friends that spring day in 1964, the men wrapping themselves in the hotel’s beach towels and pretending to be guests.

He wanted to talk to the woman by the pool. So did his friend. Fred Sears, the impartial friend of the group, proposed they flip a coin.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter what side the coin landed on. Biden had made his mind up. He walked over and sat at the edge of the woman’s lounge chair .

“Hi, I’m Joe Biden,” he said.

“Hi Joe,” the blonde replied. “I’m Neilia Hunter.” She looked up at him with her green eyes and smiled, her face illuminated by the afternoon sun.

“Basically I fell ass over tin cup in love—at first sight. She was so easy to talk to,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep.

That day, he learned Neilia was from Skaneateles, New York, and she was in her last year at Syracuse University. He learned that she hoped to teach junior high school in Syracuse in September. And most of all, he learned that she was sincere and always said the right thing, even during his embarrassing moments.

“That was her special touch, the way she made everyone feel okay about themselves. Nobody ever felt smaller around Neilia,” he wrote.

Walking back from their first date later that night, Biden couldn’t shake the thought that Neilia was the one. On the fourth and last day of his trip, he’d admit it: “You know we’re going to get married.”

“I think so,” she whispered. “I think so.”

The two tied the knot on Aug. 27, 1966 at St. Mary’s of the Lake Church in Skaneateles, New York. They later had three children: Beau, Hunter and Naomi.

Almost 60 years later, Biden has the highest position in the U.S. and is arguably SU’s most notable alumnus. He doesn’t need to sneak into four-star resorts anymore. And a lot of his early success, he has said, is tied to meeting Neilia.

Neilia — who inspired others to see the best in themselves as a teacher, role model, mother and friend — died in a car accident 50 years ago, on Dec. 18, 1972. Those who knew her in Syracuse now remember only bits and pieces about her. They recall that she was reserved, naturally beautiful and modest. But time and again, despite the haziness that comes with the years passing, everyone says, more than anything, she was kind.

Neilia

In the summer before seventh grade, 12-year-old Susan Spooner couldn’t wait to go back to her school, Bellevue Heights. She had received her teacher assignment in the mail. “Oh, boy, you’re going to have Neilia Hunter?” her friend said. “She’s beautiful, Sue.”

On the first day of the school year, a hot summer morning, Spooner took her seat in the middle of the classroom and glanced up at Ms. Hunter. She was wearing brown-rimmed glasses and had her hair pulled back. “When she started speaking, she was exactly what my girlfriend had told me: very soft spoken and beautiful personality, and looking,” Spooner said.

Neilia was the teacher every student wanted to have, Spooner said. She fostered a comfortable space in her classroom, and she easily connected with her students. Like them, Neilia had grown up and attended school in central New York.

She spent her childhood along Skaneateles Lake, where her father owned the Hunter Dinerant in Auburn and managed the Auburn Community College cafeteria. She was the oldest of her siblings, John and Michael.

As a student at Penn Hall Junior College and Preparatory School, a boarding school in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Neilia held many roles: She was the president of the international relations club, the photo editor for the Penntonian and a member of the student council, as well as a swimmer and hockey player.

Her extracurricular involvement continued at SU, where she joined the university’s chapter of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority while studying at the College of Liberal Arts.

While recruiting for the sorority, Neilia would always rave about the potential new members she spoke with, speaking kindly about everyone she met, said Arlene Vanderlinde, one of Neilia’s sorority sisters. “When I think back, of all my sisters, in all those years, she was probably the sweetest, kindest, most lovely,” Vanderlinde said.

She also remembers Neilia’s shyness. While scanning her SU yearbook from 1962, she noticed Neilia wasn’t in the Kappa Alpha Theta group photo, though her name was listed. “She just didn’t try to call attention to herself,” Vanderline said. “She was very beautiful in a very understated way. She was not flamboyant in her dress and makeup or anything.”

After graduating from SU in 1964, Neilia taught English at Bellevue Heights until 1968. She treated every student the same, whether they were a cheerleader or a quiet kid, and she kept her door open if they needed her, said Patricia Smarzo, who was a student of Neilia’s for seventh grade. Smarzo described Neilia as a “big sister” who supported Smarzo during some of the worst moments of her adolescence.

When a few kids made up a song mocking the teenager for being overweight, Smarzo went to Neilia, crying. “Who said that to you?” Neilia asked. She was so angry, and “it was like waving a flag in front of a bull,” Smarzo said.

Neilia would position herself near Smarzo’s bullies in the hallway to ensure they couldn’t make fun of her. After the teacher spoke with them multiple times, the bullies’ rampant teasing eventually stopped. One apologized years later, Smarzo said, and she believes it’s because Neilia’s words resonated with them.

Whenever Smarzo felt insecure, especially in her teen years, she would remember how Neilia would call her beautiful and help her understand that, one day, she would be happy with who she was and how she looked. “Don’t worry. You’ll grow into yourself,” Neilia would say.

“Since I was a kid in school, there have always been bullies. There always will be. But there will always be teachers out there that will take you under their wing and say, ‘It will get better,’” Smarzo said.

Neilia forged a similar connection with Patricia Cowin Wojenski, a new eighth grade student whose mother had cancer and had undergone five open heart surgeries. She was constantly worried about losing her mother, but Neilia’s compassion helped alleviate the stress of that difficult time.

Wojenski would stay with Neilia after school and would walk home with her. Neilia would listen to Wojenski talk. Though Wojenski didn’t realize it at the time, she needed a mentor and close friend like Neilia.

“(Neilia) must have seen something in me which, I don’t know what it was, that she felt that she needed to be in my life, and I really appreciated that,” she said.

The next few years, Neilia moved to Delaware with Biden, and Wojenski went to high school, but the two remained pen pals. Wojenski wrote to Neilia about everything: how tough high school was, how worried she was for her mother and how she missed her Dad, who was in Indiana.

What mattered most to Wojenski is that she always wrote back.

Joe and Neilia

Joe Biden arrived at the University of Delaware in 1961 having overcome the bullying and shame that came with his severe stutter through hard work and the support of his teachers.

He dreamt of going to law school and becoming “an esteemed public figure,” he wrote in his memoir. But during his freshman year, he was mainly interested in playing football and meeting girls.

“I figured all I had to do was graduate in four years, do well on the law school admissions test, and I’d be in law school. I knew I was smart enough,” he wrote.

His parents banned him from playing spring football after seeing his first semester grades. He was put on probation for hosing down a resident adviser with a fire extinguisher. He spent more time in the lounge debating with friends than studying at the library. It wasn’t until his junior year that he realized he needed to improve his grades to graduate.

That year, he met Neilia. After the spring break of 1964, Biden would travel more than 300 miles every weekend to see her. The more time they spent together, the more he thought about building a future for the two of them. He’d be a trial lawyer and build his own firm, then run for public office. He and Neilia discussed what kind of house they’d buy, how many kids they’d have and how he would strive to help people as an elected official.

“Once I had Neilia with me, it became more of a plan than a daydream. Nobody outside my family believed in me the way Neilia did; seeing myself through her eyes made anything seem possible,” he wrote.

In his last year at the University of Delaware, Biden focused on his schoolwork more than ever. He always had a career in mind, but now, he had someone to pursue it for.

He attended SU’s College of Law in 1965 to be with Neilia, and the couple rented a first-floor apartment on Stinard Avenue.

But Biden’s growth as a student wasn’t linear, and he fell back into old habits as a first-year at SU. He stopped striving for good grades, and he wrote a third of a 15-page paper with no quotations or citations. He was almost expelled for plagiarism, but the school failed him in the course and let him retake it instead. Deans and faculty told him that, if he didn’t start showing discipline, he wouldn’t make it through the first year.

It was Neilia who designed the strategy for how he would pass his final exams.
She would take his notes and make study sheets for his classes on torts and criminal law, and he would do the same for the one on contracts and property. She was with him every step of the way.

“Her study sheets were so detailed and the mnemonic devices she invented so clever, that I cruised through the exams in torts and criminal law,” he wrote in his memoir.

Several weeks after Joe passed his first year, the two got married at St. Mary’s. Neilia invited Spooner, who gifted them a red candy dish.

Neighbors

Throughout Biden’s years at law school, he and Neilia formed close friendships with Syracuse residents, a strength that would later serve as an advantage in Biden’s campaigns for public office.

Kevin Coyne, who lived next door to the Biden’s as a teenager, said his mother viewed Neilia as a daughter. She would invite the couple over for family dinners, make them sandwiches every Sunday and have Neilia over for coffee once a week.

The young couple grew close to members of the large Coyne family during those few years.

“(Neilia) just didn’t have a mean bone in her body,” Coyne said. And when Biden heard older boys teasing Coyne about his stutter, he vaulted the fence and warned them to never tease Coyne about his stuttering again.

The two also interacted with other kids in the neighborhood, and Neilia would sometimes bring them cookies, said Paul Shanahan, who was a child when the Bidens lived in the neighborhood.

Bill Christopherson, one of Neilia’s former students, worked as a paperboy for the neighborhood. The Bidens would offer him hot chocolate on especially cold days, he said.

Joanne Del Vecchio, who lived next door to the Bidens, sold the couple her German Shepherd puppy which Joe bought as a surprise gift for Neilia after seeing her fall in love with one. The two named the dog Senator.

The only time Peggy McCarthy would sit down at the restaurant she and her husband Mark ran together was to speak with the Bidens. Peggy, a mother of six by 1967, would speak to Neilia about having children, he said.

The couple’s ability to easily connect with community members would later help Biden become the sixth-youngest senator in U.S. history in 1972.

To further his chances of winning on Election Day for his first senate race, he needed to secure enough votes from a working class Polish neighborhood in New Castle, where he previously worked in the county council. Everyone in that neighborhood knew him and Neilia. “They thought of her as a favorite daughter,” he said. He won by less than 3,000 votes out of a total 228,000 cast.

Several weeks later, on the night of Dec. 17, 1972, Biden felt like his daydream was coming into fruition. Through the chaos and career changes, Neilia was the one that had kept everything in balance. She looked after the house, the kids and the campaign. Instead of separating the family and work life, she made them work together.

“She was completely easy in the world, almost without insecurity or self-doubt. I could be impatient, brash and off-putting, but Neilia had a way of smoothing out my rough edges,” he wrote in his memoir. He was excited about the path they were on and where it would lead them, together.

The next day, that path ended.

The accident

On Dec. 18, 1972, a tractor-trailer truck slammed into the Biden’s station wagon, killing Neilia and 1-year-old Naomi and severely injuring Beau and Hunter. When his sister Valerie told him about the accident, Biden had already sensed that she had died.

At the hospital, sitting beside his two unconscious sons, Biden felt numb. When he allowed himself to feel, the pain almost became too much, like the shards from his shattered world were cutting through.

“I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn’t just an option but a rational option,” he said in his 2007 memoir.

Senator Michael Mansfield, the majority leader at the time, wouldn’t let him drop his seat in the Senate. He owed it to his wife, who had worked too hard for him to give it up, Mansfield said. In January 1973, standing next to his sons’ hospital beds, he took his oath for office.

Biden would continue his career in politics, now serving as the President of the U.S. Five years after the accident, he married Jill Biden, an English professor.

In the decades following Neilia’s death, Biden and his sons have drawn on her central New York roots to stay connected to her. Hunter Biden has a tattoo of the Finger Lakes on his back. Beau Biden, who died of a brain tumor in 2015, decided to go to Syracuse Law in the early 1990s after seeing his mother’s photo on the wall of the Kappa Alpha Theta house.

Biden has since made numerous visits to Syracuse, attended Hunter family celebrations and stayed in touch with local friends from his time in the city. Kevin Coyne, the former neighbor, said his mother visited Biden every couple of years in Washington D.C. following the accident.

About a year after the accident, when Biden came back to Syracuse, he visited Coyne and his mother at their house.

“She was crushed. And so was he. They were both crying,” he said.

The community still finds ways to commemorate Neilia. Cayuga Community College annually confers the Neilia Hunter Biden Award for two graduates, one for journalism and one for literature.

In 2010, the Syracuse City School District set up a memorial outside the new Bellevue Elementary School building after Biden visited. A boulder with a plaque that reads “In Loving Memory of Neilia Hunter Biden: Beloved Teacher and Mentor,” sits in front of the entrance of the school.

Wojenski — who worked at Bellevue for 27 years, serving as a mentor for kids the same way Neilia did with her — bought a flowering pear tree and planted it behind the stone because “Neilia liked beautiful things.” The plaque is a powerful token of remembrance, she said, as kids see it and ask her about the former teacher.

“Every time I walk by that stone, I look at it and I just think ‘Wow, you would be so shocked that you have this little spot here for you.’ Because she was just so humble,” she said. “She never did anything for a pat on the back. She just did it because that’s how she was.”

Wojenski wrote a letter informing Biden of the memorial. She doesn’t know if he’s seen either the letter or the stone.

The visit

In May 2009, a year before SCSD set up Neilia’s memorial, Biden gave a commencement speech at SU, his alma mater. On the same day, he traveled the familiar two-mile route to Bellevue Elementary School.

There, teachers, administrators and over 100 kids, many of whom had sent letters to the Oval Office weeks before asking him to visit, gathered in the school’s auditorium on Mother’s Day to get a glimpse of Biden, who was vice president at the time.

The excitement was palpable when he walked into the room. Most cheered when he entered the room, and others gasped when he moved the stool they’d placed for him to sit on the stage’s steps with the students instead.

In his speech at Bellevue, Biden recalled how he used to travel 300 miles every weekend during his senior year at the University of Delaware to visit Neilia, and how he would play basketball with the kids while waiting for her to come out of meetings at the school.

“Bellevue has a real important place in my heart,” he said.

Sitting right on the edge of the stage was Wojenski. After Biden’s speech, a secret service member told her to follow him into the gymnasium. A few minutes later, Biden came in with his brother-in-law.

Wojenski explained to him who she was, and what Neilia meant to her. His wife was her eighth grade teacher, and the two had kept in contact. She had invited Wojenski to come to Delaware for the summer to help take care of her kids, a conversation Biden said he recalled.

And although Wojenski didn’t realize it in middle school, Neilia had been in her life at a time when she really needed someone.

At that moment, the vice president had tears coming out of his eyes.

“He put his hand on my arm. He said he was happy to meet me, and it made him feel closer to her,” she said.

Photo Illustration by Meghan Hendricks | Photo Editor. Photos courtesy of Patricia Wojenski and Stephanie Prekas.

Published on February 24, 2022 at 2:07 am

Contact Abby: akweiss@syr.edu | @abbyweiss_21