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When students in her English classes at Delaware Technical and Community College asked her if she was related to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., she would simply say yes, without elaborating.
And now, with her husband running for vice president beside Barack Obama, the candidate's wife and college professor has no intention of abandoning her previous life.
On Tuesday, she plans to resume her classes at the college in Stanton, where she has taught for 15 years.
Friends and colleagues are betting she will continue to teach even if Obama and Biden win the election in November. "I know if there's any way that she could come back and teach, I know she would do it in a second," said Charlotte Brainard, a friend and fellow English teacher at Delaware Tech.
Brainard and other colleagues said yesterday that Jill Biden, 57, never seems too busy to take a few extra minutes with a student. Or sit her family down each Sunday for dinner. Or help a friend. Or start a project that needs a leader.
When a close friend of Brainard's was struggling with her four children after her husband deployed to Kuwait two years ago, Jill Biden, who had never met the woman, showed up at her front door with a cooked turkey and all the trimmings, dessert, and a bouquet of flowers.
" 'I heard that your husband was deployed, and I thought I could give you a break and bring over dinner,' " Biden told the woman, according to Brainard.
Her interest in military families only increased after campaigning with her husband this year.
The Bidens' older son, Beau, Delaware's attorney general and an Army captain, is scheduled to deploy to Iraq this year with the Delaware National Guard.
In February, she joined Delaware Boots on the Ground, a small nonprofit of fewer than 30 people that raises money to help military members and their families with problems the military does not cover, such as paying electric bills or helping with back-to-school supplies for children, cofounder Shirley Brooks said.
The Biden name was an asset in itself: Jill Biden knew business owners and politicians who could donate larger sums and raise the organization's profile.
But she didn't stop there. When she suggested they have a fund-raiser during the week of the Fourth of July, she helped decorate big water jugs to collect dollars and change and sat at tables in local grocery stores to ask for donations, Brooks said.
She never introduced herself by name, telling shoppers she was simply a Boots on the Ground volunteer.
Before Jill Biden, the organization had only $1,500. After one week of fund-raising, the group had more than $30,000, Brooks said.
"When she came to us initially, we thought she was just going to lend us her name," Brooks said. "But it turns out that she was a volunteer who got down into the trenches with us to fund-raise."
The oldest of five daughters, Jill Tracy Jacobs was born in Hammonton, N.J., and raised in Willow Grove, Montgomery County. Her father, Donald, was a banker who died in 1999. Her mother, Bonnie, was a stay-at-home mother and still lives in Pennsylvania.
Even in high school, when teenagers tend to focus on their own drama, real and imagined, Jill saw outside of herself, said Liz Leonard, who graduated with Jill from Upper Moreland High School in 1969. She helped plan the Thanksgiving Day Dance and the "Sophomore Hop," and she always remembered when her friends had big exams coming up.
"She always made you feel good," said Leonard, a retired medical assistant from Willow Grove. "She was always there rooting you on, no matter what, no matter whether it was for an exam or at a football game."
Jill Jacobs first met Joe Biden at a fund-raiser in 1973, where he shook her hand. Two years later, Biden was in an airport or a train station and saw a beautiful blond woman in an advertisement for a park in Wilmington.
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