“He said, ‘You’d have to work in the dining hall serving rich kids,’ ” Biden told them. Biden added that his father, who had a high school education from St. Thomas Academy in Scranton, was just not interested in visiting Amherst. His father would feel uncomfortable, out of place. “That fucking got me,” O’Rourke, who graduated from Columbia University, later remarked about the exchange. “Because that obviously got Biden.” Feeling a father’s shame, 50 years on. O’Rourke noted in a journal entry that evening that “Biden’s ability to understand that feeling his dad had is part of his genius.”
