It was three minutes to show time at the Havenwood retirement community the other morning, and most of the chairs stood empty. As organizers hustled the excess seating off the floor, they asked the two dozen people who had gathered to move up front. Rather than a town meeting with Sen. Joe Biden, they said, those present would have a roundtable discussion.

Biden has been a politician long enough to have a story and a strategy for every occasion, and he did not disappoint.

The story went like this: Calvin Coolidge was on a whistle-stop tour in the 1920s. In one town he stepped out back to assay the crowd behind the caboose but then walked right back in. A startled aide asked what was wrong. Well, said Coolidge, the crowd is too big for a conversation and too small for an oration.

The strategy began with Biden asking for a chair, sitting before a shiny white fake Christmas tree, unbuttoning his nicely-cut charcoal suit jacket and telling the story of his life.

It is worth listening to the way presidential candidates talk about their lives. What they leave out can be revealing, but so can what they put in - and the lessons they take from experience.

Biden's is a familiar American story, with tragic and frightening twists. Like many in his generation especially, he rose to prominence from humble beginnings.

His family moved to Delaware from Scranton, Pa., when he was a young boy. His father was a car salesman. While Joe and his brother slept in bunk beds, "my sister, the princess, had her own room." He attended Catholic schools and the University of Delaware with the dream of becoming a running back for the New York Giants.

When that didn't work out, he went to law school at Syracuse and married. Among the events that drew him to politics was the turmoil in Wilmington after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The governor called in the National Guard to quell the riots, and the Guard remained deployed there for nine months.

Biden won election to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972. He was only 29, too young for the office under the Constitution, but his 30th birthday was coming up before the swearing-in. He won by 3,000 votes.

On Dec. 18 of that year, before he took office, his wife and family went out to get a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer broad-sided their car, killing his wife and year-old daughter and injuring his toddler sons, Beau and Hunter. One son had a skull fracture and the other had many broken bones. Biden thought about giving up the Senate seat before he had served a day, but he later took the oath of office in the hospital. When his sons were well enough, he began to commute 125 miles each way to the Capitol. As a single dad, he did not wish to give up his place with his sons.

His sons recovered and are grown, but his 90-year-old mother, who is apparently a wellspring of pithy sayings for his use on the campaign trail, lives with him. In the same house, he helped provide hospice care for his father for the final months of his life. To this day, Biden rides Amtrak for the 250-mile roundtrip to and from D.C.

Biden remarried five years after the accident. Or as he told his listeners at Havenwood, he had the good fortune to have not just one love of his life, but two.

As for real fortune, Biden prides himself, at least publicly, with being one of the poorest members of the Senate and the only major presidential candidate who is not a millionaire. As of last March, his net worth was $100,000 to $150,000. He says he didn't know when he entered public life that the point was to make a lot of money.

Biden began his first bid for president in 1987. That summer, a staffer from Michael Dukakis's campaign quietly circulated information that Biden had lifted parts of a speech from a British politician without attribution. Then C-SPAN caught Biden inflating his academic record. He pulled out. Those transgressions seem much slighter now than they did at the time. The next year, Biden was diagnosed with not one but two brain aneurysms. He twice underwent surgery to repair the damage.

At Havenwood, understandably, the one part of the story Biden left out was the downfall of his first campaign. He talked about the aneurysms in response to a question about health care. Otherwise, he left it to voters to make what they would of the ups and downs of his life.

The core of his presentation was about foreign policy, on which he is the most experienced and perhaps wisest of all the presidential candidates.

But my guess is that for the small crowd that came to meet Joe Biden, the impression he left was personal. Beneath all his smooth talk and name-dropping, Biden is a paragon of family values - the genuine article, not the cheap imitation that often mucks up American politics. Reliance on family has borne him through tragedy, fear and grief.