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SCRANTON - North Washington Avenue is quiet on this sunny late-summer day. Tommy Bell, Larry Orr and Jimmy Kennedy are here, remembering the days when they and another local kid, Joey Biden, would terrorize passersby with snowballs and water balloons and gobble bowls of his Aunt Gertie's spaghetti at her kitchen table.
"This was the gathering place for all the kids in Green Ridge," Kennedy said, stopping in front of 2446 N. Washington, a pin-neat, three-story clapboard with a small, awning-covered front porch.
This is where it all started for Biden, the newly minted Democratic vice presidential nominee, who plans to make his first campaign appearance here tomorrow. He spent the first 10 years of his life in this house, then summers and holidays visiting his grandfather after his family moved to Delaware.
In this neighborhood - older and settled now, like the Irish Catholic kids who grew up here - Biden learned values, respect for others, and the importance of keeping promises, he has said. Gone more than half a century, he still comes back every year or so, to campaign for a local candidate or speak at the annual black-tie, men-only Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner.
"Joe Biden is so loyal," said Orr, a retired electrician who stayed in Scranton to work and raise a family, along with Bell, who owns an insurance office, and Kennedy, a district magistrate.
Orr and Bell, both 65, and Kennedy, 68, see their famous friend from time to time, usually for a plate of pasta at a favorite Italian restaurant, where the talk is of those early, exuberant days.
You want stories? They got a million.
Take the time Charlie Roth, the hell-raiser of the group, now deceased, got into a scrape with an older kid twice his size.
" 'Wait till my buddy Joe Biden gets here. He's going to take care of you,' " Orr recalled Roth saying.
"Charlie was always getting Joe in trouble," Bell jumped in. "Joe comes, and, boom, the other guy goes down."
"Joe wouldn't back down from a fight. He was fearless," Orr said.
Or the time Orr and Biden pitched snowballs at a coal truck and beaned the driver, who was so mad he chased them up the steps of Biden's house. Aunt Gertie, who lived with the family, had to beat him back with a broom.
They have file drawers full of memories, playing baseball with their New Car Little League team, building forts in the woods that are now part of the Marywood University campus, camping out in Biden's backyard and awakening to his mother's bacon and eggs.
"It was an innocent time. It really was," Orr said. "There were no drugs or anything like that. We played baseball, went to the movies."
The city of his youth plays a big role in Biden's book, Promises to Keep, published last year by Random House. The prologue and first chapter give a utopian view of his upbringing in Green Ridge.
"The first principle of politics, the foundational principle, I learned in the 1950s in my grandpop's kitchen when I was about 12 or 13 years old," he wrote in the book's opening line.
Not forgotten were his best friends, who get a big mention.
"Once we spent our limit on penny candy from Simmey's, Charlie Roth, Larry Orr, Tommy Bell and I would head down to the Roosie (Roosevelt) Theater for the 12-cent double feature - usually a pair of westerns or Tarzan," he wrote.
Simmey's is now Hanks, and while the penny candy is gone, the store sells a terrific Italian hoagie, which the senator orders when he's in town.
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