Jill Tracy
Jacobs was born on June 3, 1951, in Hammonton, New Jersey. She is the oldest of
five sisters. Her father, Donald Carl Jacobs, was a bank teller and U.S. Navy
signalman during World War II who used the G.I. Bill to attend business school
and then worked his way up in the banking field.
First Lady
Jill Biden has famously been “Dr.” Jill Biden since 2007, when she was awarded
her doctorate in education from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation
was on community colleges, titled “Student retention at the community college:
meeting students' needs.”
How Joe
and Jill first met
"How
did you get this number?"
Those were
the first words she spoke to Joe when he called her out of the blue on a
Saturday in 1975. She met Senator Joe Biden in March 1975.They met on a blind
date set up by his brother Frank, who had known her in college, though Biden
had seen her photograph in a local advertisement.
They went
out to see A Man and a Woman at the movie theater in Philadelphia, and they
really hit it off. When they got home, Joe shook Jill's hand goodnight and she
called her mother to say, "Mom, I finally met a gentleman."
Read more: Relationship age gap rules: The acceptable age for who you can date
Although he was nearly nine years her senior, she was impressed by his more formal appearance and manners compared to the college men she had known, and after their first date, she told her mother, "Mom, I finally met a gentleman." Meanwhile, she was going through turbulent divorce proceedings with Stevenson. A civil divorce was granted in May 1975.
The senator
"wasn't big on the whole date scene" after suffering a personal
tragedy years prior. In 1972, his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and their
one-year-old daughter were killed in a car accident, turning his and his sons'
lives upside down. But "when I met Jill, I fell in love with her when I
saw her," he said.
Joe proposed five times. Jill explained that she was hesitant to accept the proposals at first because of how attached she had become to Joe's two sons. "I loved the boys so much. I had to be sure that it had to be forever." But the kids loved Jill too. Joe recalled the young siblings telling him one morning, "Dad, we think it's time we married Jill."
She and Joe Biden were married on June 17, 1977, at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York City. They spent their honeymoon at Lake Balaton in the Hungarian People's Republic, behind the Iron Curtain.
