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A five-year-old lifeguard story about hairy legs just handed Joe Biden’s 2020 rivals a fresh punchline.
A video clip resurfacing on Twitter in early December 2019 has put Joe Biden back in the crosshairs of conservative media, and this time it’s not about “CornPop.” The footage, pulled from a 2017 speech in Wilmington, Delaware, shows the 2020 Democratic front-runner recounting his summer job as a teenage lifeguard — a story that veers into an odd tangent about his leg hair and kids climbing into his lap. The clip landed just as Biden’s campaign was rolling out its Iowa bus tour, and it spread fast.
- The remarks originate from June 26, 2017, when Biden spoke at the renaming of the Prices Run Park pool in Wilmington to the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Aquatic Center.
- Biden told the crowd he worked as the only white lifeguard at the predominantly Black pool in 1962, then described kids rubbing his leg hair down “so it was straight” before it “came back up again.”
- The clip re-emerged on Twitter around December 1, 2019, timed to the launch of Biden’s “No Malarkey” bus tour through Iowa, and it revived a controversy alongside the older “CornPop” anecdote from the same 2017 speech.
The Pool Dedication That Started It All
The original moment has nothing to do with the White House — Biden wasn’t president in 2017, he was a private citizen three years removed from the vice presidency. He’d returned to Wilmington to be honored at Brown Burton Winchester Park, where the city renamed its public pool facility after him. Local officials and community leaders joined him, along with kids from a summer program at the Ark Learning Center who were on hand for the ceremony.
Biden used the moment to reach back to 1962, when he worked as a lifeguard at the same pool — then known as Prices Run — as a college student. He framed it as a formative experience in understanding the Black community during the civil rights era, telling the crowd he took the job specifically because it let him work at a pool that served a mostly African American neighborhood.
The Leg-Hair Anecdote
It’s what came next that has followed Biden for years. Straying from the script, he described the physical discomfort of the lifeguard stand and the kids who used to entertain themselves at his expense:
“And by the way, I sit on the stand and it’d get hot. I got hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun. And the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down so it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again. They’d look at it. So I learned about roaches, I learned about kids jumping on my lap. And I’ve loved kids jumping on my lap.”
Taken as a stray, self-deprecating memory about a summer job, the line is harmless nostalgia. Cut down to fifteen seconds and stripped of the pool-renaming context, it reads very differently — which is exactly the treatment it got once it hit Twitter again in late 2019.
Resurgence During the Iowa Tour
The clip went semi-viral once before, in September 2019, when the same 2017 speech’s “CornPop” story — Biden’s account of a standoff with a Wilmington gang leader named William “CornPop” Morris — became an internet meme in its own right. This time, the leg-hair excerpt got pulled out and posted separately around December 1, 2019, just as Biden kicked off his “No Malarkey” bus tour across Iowa ahead of the caucuses. Critics and opponents seized on the timing, calling the remarks bizarre and using them to reinforce a broader narrative about Biden’s off-the-cuff style on the trail. Supporters countered that the full 2017 remarks were about civil rights history and community service, not anything untoward, and that selective editing turned an awkward but innocent story into a scandal.
Implications of the Current Controversy
None of this changed Biden’s standing as the 2020 field’s front-runner heading into the Iowa caucuses, but it fed into a pattern his campaign had been fighting all year — every off-script tangent getting clipped, captioned, and blasted across social media within hours. It’s the same dynamic that turned “CornPop” into shorthand for Biden gaffes months earlier.
The bus kept rolling through Iowa regardless. Biden’s “No Malarkey” tour was built around retail-politics stops in small towns ahead of the February caucuses, and the campaign didn’t address the leg-hair clip directly — betting, as it had with CornPop, that the story would burn out online faster than it could move actual voters.
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