{"id":82239,"date":"2026-01-09T10:23:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T10:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/82239\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T10:23:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T10:23:06","slug":"a-scranton-neighborhood-group-put-up-a-hometown-hero-banner-for-joe-biden-outside-his-childhood-home-controversy-ensued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/82239\/","title":{"rendered":"A Scranton neighborhood group put up a \u2018hometown hero\u2019 banner for Joe Biden outside his childhood home. Controversy ensued."},"content":{"rendered":"

When a Scranton neighborhood group decided to honor Joe Biden<\/a> with a \u201chometown hero\u201d banner outside the 46th president\u2019s childhood home recently, they expected a little bit of blowback.<\/p>\n

But members of the Green Ridge Neighborhood Association say they\u2019re dumbfounded by the number of complaints and even threats, both locally and abroad.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomeone in Guam has been very vocal,\u201d Roberta Jadick, the association\u2019s secretary, said beneath the banner on North Washington Avenue on a recent snowy weekday. <\/p>\n

\u201cHometown Heroes\u201d banners first appeared in Harrisburg in 2006, according to the program\u2019s website,<\/a> and they\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

While most of the banners honor veterans, no rule prohibits municipalities, civic groups, or veterans\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, teachers are heroes, aren\u2019t they?\u201d Jadick said.<\/p>\n

The banner on North Washington Avenue near Biden Street depicts the former president in a suit, with the title \u201cCommander in Chief, U.S. Armed Forces, 2021-2025\u2033 written beneath it. Agostini said the group was aware that \u201cCommander in Chief\u201d was a civilian title.<\/p>\n

Agostini said the initial blowback was political but that the issue \u201cmorphed\u201d into a veterans\u2019 issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe never intended to portray him as a veteran,\u201d Agostini said. \u201cThere\u2019s only been 46 presidents in the United States, and each one had a hometown, and we thought this is a unique honor.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Dec. 21 Facebook<\/a> post about the banner by the Green Ridge Neighborhood Association received nearly 250 comments, ranging from supportive to critical to crude. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s an embarrassment!\u201d one commenter wrote.<\/p>\n

A similar controversy erupted in 2021, when a four-lane highway in Scranton was renamed President Joe Biden Expressway.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

A Hometown Heroes banner honoring the Finnegans is just one light pole down from Biden\u2019s. No one from the Hometown Heroes Banner Program returned requests for comment on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

One local veteran, Andy Chomko, said he doesn\u2019t have a problem with Biden being honored in Scranton, but his banner should not look like veterans\u2019 banners.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great thing that he lived here and had roots here,\u201d Chomko said. \u201cBut the banner makes it look like he\u2019s a veteran, and every one of those people on those other banners put their lives at risk for their country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Navy veteran Harold Nudelman told WNEP-16<\/a> that Biden \u201cdidn\u2019t put his life on the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t portray him as a veteran. He didn\u2019t serve. He didn\u2019t take that oath to serve as we did,\u201d he told the news station.<\/p>\n

Chomko, who served in Iraq<\/a> and Afghanistan with the Army, believes the Green Ridge group should remove the banner and \u201crethink it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That could happen after Monday, the group will vote on the future of the banner at a public meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say the vast majority of people support it or really don\u2019t care,\u201d Agostini said. \u201cI don\u2019t take any of this lightly, though, and while we were hoping it would be dying down, we\u2019ll have an open discussion about it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Jadick said the banner was never meant to divide the public even more than it is. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf Trump was from here, he\u2019d have a banner up after he was out of office,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is where Joe Biden is from. Those are his uncles on the other banner.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When a Scranton neighborhood group decided to honor Joe Biden with a \u201chometown hero\u201d banner outside the 46th…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[41460,178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-82239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-hometown-hero-joe-biden-banner-scranton","9":"tag-scranton","10":"tag-scranton-headlines","11":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}