Biden’s ‘record player’ just 1 of his vintage references
Joe Biden’s suggestion that parents leave a record player on to teach their babies better vocabulary was a headscratching (needle-scratching?) moment in Thursday’s debate.
But it was hardly the first time the 76-year-old Biden has busted out a vintage reference that reveals his age and leaves some in the audience in the dark.
Famous for his off-the-cuff storytelling, the former vice president regularly goes deep in the vault to pull out characters and events known primarily to a people of a certain age. Ever heard of Henry Carr? How about a Jerry can?
The debate about Biden’s age has large focused so far on his capacity, but it may be that his cultural frames of reference pose an equally vexing issue. Aides dispute the idea, saying it’s just Joe being Joe and hardly a sign that he can’t connect with younger voters. One joked Friday that thanks to hipsters, some old things are new again. “You don’t know about the vinyl vote?” adviser Symone Sanders told CNN.
Still, if you need some explanation of Biden’s oldschool riffs, keep reading. parents “play the radio” and “have the record player on at night” so their child can hear words and learn, suggesting that a child from “a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken” by the time school has started.
Record players designed for listening to vinyl records largely fell out of popular use in the 1980s with the introduction of CDs. In the era of online music streaming, vinyl and record players have become a vintage specialty item.
Biden’s suggestion that families turn on their record player or radio appears to be a reference to what’s known as the “word gap,” the concept that well-off children hear far more words before starting school than poor kids. It’s based on a landmark but hotly debated 1995 study that found poor children hear a fraction of the words their wealthier peers do, adding up to about 30 million fewer words by age 3.
The research led to efforts to close the word gap, including one championed by the Obama administration. But even there Biden seems a bit off the mark. The aim was to encourage parents talk to their children more, not to encourage children to watch more televisions — or listen to record players. group of high school students in New Orleans, recalling his lifeguard days in Wilmington, Delaware, and the black teenagers he befriended. Among them was Spencer Henry, a Delaware state champion sprinter in the early 1960s. Biden dropped the reference to Spencer beating Carr as if the latter ought to be as familiar as Michael Jordan or Serena Williams.
Carr was an icon of the mid-60s. Nicknamed “The Gray Ghost,” he won two gold medals in the 1964 summer Olympics in Tokyo and went on to play in the NFL. His football career ended in 1969.
At the same event in New Orleans, Biden told the teenagers a story about a friend who wanted to borrow a “Jerry can.”
“You know,” Biden added, “a big five-gallon can.” The term was given to metal fuel cans, and named for the term allies gave to German soldiers in World War II, who commonly used the receptacles.