By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 20, 2020 – There’s an item in the NASSAU GRAPEVINE column of the Monday, November 16, 2020, issue of THE PUNCH, a popular twice-weekly newspaper in Nassau Bahamas, that should arrest the attention of the powers-that-be at The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism and Aviation who are responsible for maintaining The Bahamas’ status as one of the world’s leading tourist destinations.
Clearly, it should get the “creative juices” flowing in the minds of those persons who design and develop advertisements promoting The Bahamas to potential visitors around the world, especially during the current slow down in the country’s Number One industry as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today is President-elect Joe Biden’s birthday, and I remembered the item in THE PUNCH, which I read yesterday, when I was about to wish Happy Birthday to the President-elect under an official photo published on Facebook. So, happy birthday Mr. President-elect. Here’s an excerpt from the article in THE PUNCH:
“U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has happy memories of being a spring-breaker in The Bahamas. So, perhaps Biden may go out of his way to look after The Bahamas once he makes it into the White House. When Joe Biden was an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, he and several of his fellow students spent part of their 1964 spring break in Miami.
“While in Miami, they saw an advert promoting a round-trip flight to Nassau for $25. They decided to go. While in Nassau, they went to the British Colonial Hotel, now the Hilton, to look for girls. According to Biden, he spotted a very attractive blonde girl by the pool. And so he went and introduced himself to Neilia Hunter. That was the start of a storybook love affair…”
Actually, I was aware of the fact that President-elect Biden met his first wife while on spring break in The Bahamas because on November 8, BAHAMAS CHRONICLE reproduced a story that was published on Facebook, which mentioned this fact and noted: “The first Mrs. Biden was born in 1942 in Skaneateles, N.Y. Neilia Hunter was the daughter of diner owners, according to The Independent, and probably pretty prosperous ones, too, as she was able to attend boarding school at Penn Hall. She later studied at Syracuse University, and during her junior year, took a spring break trip to Nassau, where she met a University of Delaware junior named Joe.”
As indicated by its headline, THE HEARTREAKING STORY OF JOE BIDEN’S FIRST WIFE, the story on Facebook gave details of Neilia Biden’s tragic death. Here is an excerpt:
While Joe Biden seems like such an affable, good-tempered guy, the fact is, he’s had a surprisingly tragic life. Just a few years ago, he lost his oldest son, Beau, to cancer, while his younger son, Hunter, has spent years struggling to free himself from dependence on drugs and alcohol. (Joe himself is famously sober, due to an admitted family propensity for addiction.)
Perhaps his life’s greatest sorrow, however, occurred early on in his senatorial career when he received the kind of phone call every spouse, and parent, dreads. As Biden told Marie Claire, that grim December day in 1972 he learned, “My wife and three children were Christmas shopping. A tractor-trailer broadsided them and killed my wife and killed my daughter.”
Suddenly the young senator-elect from Delaware found himself a single dad with his two surviving kids in the hospital with serious injuries, and he was actually sworn into office at their bedsides. Hunter, in presenting Beau’s eulogy in 2015, noted that being in the hospital was his very first memory. “I was almost three years old,” he said. “I remember my brother who was one year and one day older than me, holding my hand, staring into my eyes, saying, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ over and over and over again.”
Once the kids were out of the hospital, Biden resumed his political career but rode the train back to their home in Wilmington every night from his D.C. office, thus earning the nickname Amtrak Joe (via Marie Claire). See BAHAMAS CHRONICLE for a link to the full story at https://www.thelist.com/237847/the-heartbreaking-story-of-joe-bidens-first-wife/
