A Scranton neighborhood group put up a ‘hometown hero’ banner for Joe Biden outside his childhood home. Controversy ensued.
The initial blowback was political but it has “morphed” into a veterans’ issue.
When a Scranton neighborhood group decided to honor Joe Biden with a “hometown hero” banner outside the 46th president’s childhood home recently, they expected a little bit of blowback.
But members of the Green Ridge Neighborhood Association say they’re dumbfounded by the number of complaints and even threats, both locally and abroad.
“Someone in Guam has been very vocal,” Roberta Jadick, the association’s secretary, said beneath the banner on North Washington Avenue on a recent snowy weekday.
“Hometown Heroes” banners first appeared in Harrisburg in 2006, according to the program’s website, and they’ve become ubiquitous in small-town and suburban Pennsylvania. Most appear as black-and-white photos of men and women in uniform, thousands of veterans honored in nearly every corner of the Commonwealth.
While most of the banners honor veterans, no rule prohibits municipalities, civic groups, or veterans’ groups from honoring others, said Laura Agostini, president of the Green Ridge group. Some towns have put up banners of high school athletes or law enforcement officials.
“I mean, teachers are heroes, aren’t they?” Jadick said.
The banner on North Washington Avenue near Biden Street depicts the former president in a suit, with the title “Commander in Chief, U.S. Armed Forces, 2021-2025″ written beneath it. Agostini said the group was aware that “Commander in Chief” was a civilian title.
Agostini said the initial blowback was political but that the issue “morphed” into a veterans’ issue.
“We never intended to portray him as a veteran,” Agostini said. “There’s only been 46 presidents in the United States, and each one had a hometown, and we thought this is a unique honor.”
A Dec. 21 Facebook post about the banner by the Green Ridge Neighborhood Association received nearly 250 comments, ranging from supportive to critical to crude.
“He’s an embarrassment!” one commenter wrote.
A similar controversy erupted in 2021, when a four-lane highway in Scranton was renamed President Joe Biden Expressway.
Biden was born in Scranton in 1942 and lived there on and off, and he repeatedly mentioned Scranton as a formative place. A plaque outside the home where Biden lived with his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan, said he moved out when he was 10 years old.
A Hometown Heroes banner honoring the Finnegans is just one light pole down from Biden’s. No one from the Hometown Heroes Banner Program returned requests for comment on Wednesday.
One local veteran, Andy Chomko, said he doesn’t have a problem with Biden being honored in Scranton, but his banner should not look like veterans’ banners.
“It’s a great thing that he lived here and had roots here,” Chomko said. “But the banner makes it look like he’s a veteran, and every one of those people on those other banners put their lives at risk for their country.”
Navy veteran Harold Nudelman told WNEP-16 that Biden “didn’t put his life on the line.”
“Don’t portray him as a veteran. He didn’t serve. He didn’t take that oath to serve as we did,” he told the news station.
Chomko, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Army, believes the Green Ridge group should remove the banner and “rethink it.”
That could happen after Monday, the group will vote on the future of the banner at a public meeting.
“I would say the vast majority of people support it or really don’t care,” Agostini said. “I don’t take any of this lightly, though, and while we were hoping it would be dying down, we’ll have an open discussion about it.”
Jadick said the banner was never meant to divide the public even more than it is.
“If Trump was from here, he’d have a banner up after he was out of office,” she said. “This is where Joe Biden is from. Those are his uncles on the other banner.”