How Joe Biden and Dr. Jill first met with pics

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."

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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.