by Bill Moushey
Joe’s love for football began on the streets of Flatbush. He played the game for hours with neighborhood kids, who used manhole covers and street curbs as boundaries. A Boy Scout and an altar boy, Joe may not have been the biggest or most talented kid in those pickup games, but he was the most intense. During one game he was so focused on catching a pass that he ran face-first into a tree and split open his lip. He would show the scar to anyone who cared to see it.
Even back then he believed he was destined to do great things. After graduating from St. Edmond’s Grammar School, Joe and George enrolled in Brooklyn Preparatory High School, a prestigious private school in the Crown Heights neighborhood adjoining Flatbush. Their father worked second and third jobs to pay the tuition. Joe’s self-determination was strengthened by the teachings of the Jesuit priests at Brooklyn Prep, and he and George were great assets to the school. Joe was the quarterback on their winning football team and the captain of their basketball team. He was also the senior class president. George also distinguished himself as a scholar and an athlete.
The school had a strict dress code, with students required to wear jackets and ties to class. The curriculum was comprehensive, with courses in calculus, Greek, and Latin. Joe loved to translate ancient stories from Latin to English just for the fun of it. One of his Jesuit instructors, Father Thomas Bermingham, taught him the story of Aeneas, the mythical hero who fled ancient Troy after the war to found the Roman Empire. Joe saw parallels between football and Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid. His favorite part of the poem, which he related many times, was when Aeneas left the burning city of Troy carrying his father on his back and holding the hand of his son—a metaphor for preserving the past while nurturing the future. To Joe, Aeneas was the ultimate team man. His copy of The Aeneid was in Latin; he had translated the poem line by line, and it remained a favorite piece of literature long after he left Brooklyn Prep.
While he excelled in his studies, it was on the high school football team that Joe made a name for himself. He was a scrappy, left-handed quarterback, and his younger brother was a bruising fullback. The local newspapers took note of their play and named them “the Gold Dust Twins.” In Joe’s senior year Brooklyn Prep’s football team was regarded as the best Catholic high school team in New York City. Still, it lost a playoff game to St. Cecilia High School of Englewood, New Jersey, coached by another future legend, Vince Lombardi. Lombardi, who also grew up in Flatbush, went on to coach the Green Bay Packers, which won five National Football League championships in seven years. Every year since 1967 Super Bowl victors are awarded the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Joe also played baseball, but he wasn’t very good. In fact, when his high school coach, Earl Graham, saw him swing a bat, he said, “You couldn’t hit a bull’s ass with a banjo.” But baseball influenced Joe in another way. In 1943, when Joe was seventeen, Graham took him to see the New York Yankees play in the World Series. During the game the coach pointed out how polished the Yankees were, with shiny shoes and well-fitting pinstriped uniforms, unlike the scruffy uniforms of their opponents, the St. Louis Cardinals. When the Yankees won the title, Joe assumed the team’s groomed appearance had contributed to their success. He liked the idea of conservative, simple uniforms worn with dignity and respect.
During his high school days Joe earned spending money by working as an usher at Ebbets Field in Flatbush, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In those days everyone sitting on the stoops or tenement steps in the summer had his radio tuned to the Dodgers game, with Fred “Dixie” Walker playing right field, Joe “Ducky” Medwick in left, Gil Hodges on first base, and Leo “the Lip” Durocher at shortstop.
Joe loved the pickup games at Marine Park on Jamaica Bay. On weekends all the kids from Flatbush rode their bikes there, to the Pratt-White Athletic Field, to play for hours. Even though Joe’s sports were football and basketball, he was athletic enough to hold his own. He played with the older brothers of the famous New York Yankees’ manager Joe Torre, who was a Flatbush native and thirteen years Joe’s junior. Joe once dated Torre’s sister, Marguerite. He was a bit of a celebrity himself because of his football exploits with Brooklyn Prep.
After receiving his high school diploma in 1945, Joe was drafted into the U.S. Army; he was stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. World War II was coming to an end, so he never saw combat overseas. He was sent to Korea, however, where the U.S. Army accepted the surrender of Japanese soldiers in the southern part of the country. He was granted an early discharge in 1946 to enroll at Brown University, courtesy of a benefactor named Everett “Busy” Arnold, who underwrote the cost of a college education for students who could play football. Arnold was a 1921 graduate of Brown University who had struck it rich in New York publishing comic books. He wanted his alma mater to be competitive against rival Ivy League schools such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. He had heard through the grapevine of the athletic achievements of the Paterno brothers from Flatbush and, in a practice that was legal at the time, paid the tuition for both brothers to attend Brown.
Despite Arnold’s generosity, Joe was not immediately comfortable amid the snobbery at Brown. As a freshman he once attended a fraternity party dressed in a pair of slacks and a white sweater. Unfortunately everyone else was wearing blue blazers and navy striped ties. Joe overheard one of the rich Wasp students utter an ethnic slur offensive to Italians, “How did that dago get invited?” He was hurt by the comment but rose above it, determined to prove that he was just as smart as or smarter than those haughty New Englanders. In time he did become a member of a different fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon.
Even though he was just five-feet-eight and weighed 160 pounds, he stood out on the football field. In addition to playing quarterback, he finished his career with fourteen interceptions as a defensive back, setting a school record that has yet to be surpassed. In his last two seasons the Bears won fifteen games and lost only three. Joe won games out of sheer competitiveness more than athletic ability. Stanley Woodward, the sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote of Joe, “He can’t run and he can’t pass. All he can do is think and win.”
JOE ARRIVED AT PENN STATE with some clothes, his vinyl records of Verdi and Puccini operas, and a few of his favorite books. He moved into a spare bedroom in Engle’s new house, not far from campus. He had made a deal to board with his new boss for a year.
Penn State had 12,000 students and State College had 20,000 residents in 1950. The small town, conservative in its politics and religious views, had none of the hustle and bustle or sharp elbows of Brooklyn or Providence. There were two main streets, College Avenue, near the campus, and Beaver Avenue. Pennshire Clothes, Woodrings Floral Gardens, and the Warner Theater mixed with banks, drugs stores, the laundromat, a bookstore, and a dozen churches. Townies and students alike ate at The Diner on College Avenue, just a block from campus; the railway car diner had been there since 1929. The Tavern was the only restaurant that served anything close to Italian; spaghetti was on the menu, but there was celery in the sauce. His mother’s genuine homemade spaghetti sauce had lots of tasty spices, but not celery.
The football stadium, Beaver Field, was a down-at-the-heels facility built in 1909. It was only a couple of blocks from Engle’s house. Penn State attracted an average of 21,000 fans for its four home games the year Paterno and Engle arrived.
Joe’s first impression of provincial State College wasn’t favorable. A couple of weeks in he told Engle to start looking for another assistant because being in a town that small and isolated was going to drive him nuts. But after the culture shock eased, he grew to love the place. There was something alluring about the open spaces and the forested ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. Penn State was a hard place to get to, but it was harder to leave.
As Engle’s assistant coach, Joe was a loyal apprentice. In fact, he became the coach’s eyes and ears. At Engle’s urging, he moved into a dormitory where fifty members of the Nittany Lions football team occupied the first two floors. Joe served as t
he dorm monitor. If he heard of bad conduct, such as players drinking or skipping class, he reported it to his boss. Players secretly called him “Joe the Rat” for his snitching. He was “Joe the Rat” for his appearance too. At rainy games and practices, his thick black hair would fall down over his face and his big Italian nose poked out, giving him the appearance of a rodent. But Joe never worried about his popularity, just his effectiveness in getting the best out of his players. “You can’t be a nice guy and do this job,” he would say.
After several seasons at Penn State, Joe confided to his father that he intended to coach as a career and not pursue a law degree. “Whatever you do, make an impact,” Angelo told his son. “Don’t waste your life just winning football games. Have an impact.” Joe gave his father his word. He had been at Penn State for five years when Angelo died, in September 1955. Joe went home to Flatbush to grieve with his family, which caused him to miss Penn State’s game against Army. It was the first of only three games he would miss in his six decades of coaching. In honor of his mother and father, he would later establish a fellowship in the Department of Political Science, the Florence and Angelo Paterno Graduate Fellowship in the Liberal Arts.
In 1959 he met Suzanne Pohland, a perky first-year English literature major from the southwestern Pennsylvania town of Latrobe, home of Rolling Rock beer and the golfer Arnold Palmer, in the Penn State library. She was eighteen and he was thirty-one, and they shared a love of literature. They discussed the literary merits of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Camus’s The Stranger. Sue eventually fell in love with the scholar in him, and they were married soon after she graduated three years later. En route to Virginia Beach for their honeymoon, Sue learned just how much she would have to share her new husband when Joe stopped in Somerset County to pay a visit to a football recruit while she waited in the car. From the start it was clear that football was his life and she would have to accept that.
Sue taught English for one year at Bellefonte High School before she gave birth to a daughter, Diane, in 1963. Four more children—May Kay, David, Scott, and Joseph Jr.—would follow. To accommodate the family, Joe and Sue bought a modest stone-and-glass ranch house at 830 McKee Street in State College, where they lived for forty-nine years.
Paterno had the habit of wearing his best pair of wool slacks on game days, and invariably the cuffs would be spattered with mud as he paced the sidelines. Sue suggested that he roll up the cuffs to save on dry-cleaning bills. Because his dress shoes also took a beating on the muddy sidelines, he opted to wear sturdy black football shoes; they fit best when worn over thick white socks. Thus was born the Paterno look.
Paterno was tempted to leave Penn State in 1964, when Yale University offered him the job of head coach. The thought of running his own program at an Ivy League school appealed to him, but first he needed to know if he would be in line for the Penn State slot when Engle retired. Engle had endorsed Paterno as his heir apparent and even accompanied him to a meeting with the university’s administration. No promises were made, but Paterno was told he would get the job if the school thought he was the best choice. As a result he turned down Yale’s offer. When Engle did retire after the 1965 season, Paterno’s patience paid off. He was awarded the head coach’s job.
Joe had such a good relationship with Penn State by this time that the formality of a contract wasn’t necessary. He agreed to take the position on a handshake for a salary of $20,000, a comfortable income at the time. At the age of thirty-eight, he launched an ambitious program to take Penn State football to a higher level. The Nittany Lions hadn’t had a losing season in twenty-seven years, but their opponents were mostly from the eastern United States and were not considered as powerful as teams such as Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, Notre Dame, and the University of Southern California. Penn State and its regional rivals competed for the Lambert Trophy, a sort of consolation prize. Joe wanted to win national championships against the best opponents out there, but he also wanted to win with scholar-athletes.
Paterno called his ambitious plan the Grand Experiment. To explain the plan, he asked the players he recruited, “What if we have the best of both worlds? What if Penn State kids were smart enough to graduate from Harvard and athletic enough to beat Alabama?”
Chapter 2
The Age of Paterno
The Age of Paterno looked nothing like the Age of Aquarius, that rebellious time in the 1960s when a generation became enamored with the long-haired look made popular by the Beatles. Joe asserted his authority immediately upon becoming head coach. Penn State football players were not among those breaking from established traditions or openly questioning authority, like their contemporaries, the antiestablishment hippies. Their new coach insisted on honorable behavior. Appearance-wise, he set the standard for short hair and forbade beards and mustaches. Shirts had to have collars; wearing shoes without socks was unacceptable. Members of his inaugural recruiting class said that Paterno thought bare ankles in shoes was one of the worst looks in the world. When he took over as coach, it was traditional for male fans to wear blue blazers and neckties to games. Crowds were staid and stoic. It was considered in bad taste to cheer too loudly.
A trend at the time was to put the names of players on the backs of jerseys. Joe would have none of that. Aeneas would never put names on the backs of his soldiers’ uniforms, he reasoned. He maintained the understated look of the Penn State uniform until very late in his career. In the coach’s eyes, it was all about team, not individuality.
For Joe Paterno, football was a world unto itself. He even had groundskeepers paint a blue line around the football field to demarcate the boundaries of his empire. Once a player crossed that blue line, he was supposed to leave behind all distractions and give his complete attention to football. Outsiders weren’t invited. Practice sessions were closed to the sports writers who covered the team. Those practices were pretty intense. Players said it wasn’t uncommon for him to grab a guy by the facemask and look directly into his eyes as he was screaming at him. Practices were also filmed; a camera recorded everything that went on, ostensibly to see how players were performing, but Big Brother was watching all the time.
Joe spent hours alone in his office at home devising formations and game plans. He was so busy during football season his family would see him only at dinnertime; then he would go back upstairs to his office to strategize, usually while listening to his operas.
His game plans were conservative, and they were the same in his first victory as they were in his last: play strong defense, be sound in the kicking game, and don’t turn the ball over to the other team with fumbles or interceptions. Charles Pittman, a running back who was a member of Joe’s inaugural recruiting class, joked that Penn State played offense only because the rules dictated it.
When Pittman arrived on campus for his freshman year in 1966, 99 percent of the student body was white, and State College still had businesses that were segregated. Pittman and his roommate, the linebacker Jim Kates of Plainfield, New Jersey, were the only African Americans on the team.
The son of a steelworker from Baltimore’s inner city, Pittman was a prized candidate for the Grand Experiment. He was the captain of the Edmonson High School football team, which never lost a game when he was there. Scoring more points than any other player in the state of Maryland helped land him a spot on Parade Magazine’s High School All-American Team. He was also a scholar, voted most likely to succeed by his classmates. Pittman entertained scholarship offers from Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Maryland, but he chose Penn State even though Rip Engle was leaving and Paterno was just taking the reins.
To Pittman, Paterno was more of a life coach than a football coach. Pittman recalled a time at the start of his first football camp, when freshmen were subjected to the ritual of singing the alma mater for the entertainment of the upper classmen. The older players were letting the new guys know that although they may have been superstars in high school, they were starting out on the bottom rung at Penn State.
Pittman felt uncomfortable when it was his turn to sing, and Paterno sensed his awkwardness. He told the other team members, “Maybe we’ll save that for a later day.” It wasn’t a pass; everybody on the team had to conform to the same rules, and Pittman did sing some days later, after he had adjusted to his surroundings. But he was impressed that Paterno was sensitive to his feelings. “He was a tough task-master,” Pittman said. “He would yell and scream in that high-pitched Brooklyn accent of his and get into some guys’ faces when he thought it was appropriate. But I never responded to yelling and screaming. He would put his arm on my shoulder and tell me to be the best player possible. He had a way with people. He was controlling, but all football coaches are controlling. I mean, we all voted to elect captains, but Joe was the one who counted the votes. He had eyes and ears everywhere. He knew everything that was going on.”
Paterno’s first game as a head coach was a 15–7 win over Maryland on September 17, 1966, in front of 37,270 fans at Beaver Stadium, which changed its name from Beaver Field in 1960. The rookie coach was awarded the game ball afterward. The sophomore defensive tackle Mike Reid scored the first points of the Paterno era by blocking a punt for a safety. Reid was also credited with two more safeties that day, accounting for six of his team’s points. Although Reid had enrolled at Penn State under Engle, he was just the kind of player Paterno wanted for his Grand Experiment. A native of Altoona, Pennsylvania, Reid defied the stereotype that football players could lift pianos but not play them. He went on to win the Outland Trophy as the outstanding interior lineman in college football and after graduating became a concert pianist and a Grammy Award-winning musician.
