The Lion in Autumn

by Frank Fitzpatrick

  In a 1935 interview with the Daily Collegian, former coach Hugo Bezdek observed that Penn State might be tilting too heavily toward the amateur model. “[Penn State] should cast off its Simon-pure pretensions and bring back scholarships,” Bezdek said. President Ralph Hetzel quickly rejected the suggestion.

  Scholarships would be reinstated fifteen years later, in part because even then Penn State saw football as a valuable revenue-producer. In 1927, thirty million college-football fans bought $50 million worth of tickets. In the aftermath of World War II, with the GI Bill flooding campuses with returning veterans, those numbers jumped significantly. Competing colleges began to view football as a means both to make money and to attract the new breed of everyday students.

  Penn State’s student population soared to 10,200 in 1946, with more than half of them returning veterans. A year later, eighty percent were vets. Temporary dormitories, labeled “Veterans Villages,” were constructed on the east end of the campus to accommodate the mad rush.

  With thousands more students, and in many cases their families, on campus, attendance and interest increased for the football games at fourteen-thousand-seat Beaver Field. In 1946, the Nittany Lions attracted five-figure crowds to all their home games for the first time ever. And with postwar victories over nationally recognized teams like Navy, Pitt, and Washington State, demand stayed strong. In 1949, the trustees decided to more than double the size of the facility, expanding its seating capacity to twenty-nine thousand.

  Higgins’s last two Penn State teams, in 1947 and 1948, went 9–0–1 and 7–1–1. The ‘47 team, without any scholarship players, earned a No. 4 national ranking and a berth in the Cotton Bowl, where the Nittany Lions tied Doak Walker’s SMU Mustangs, 13–13. When Higgins retired following the ‘48 season, he was replaced by assistant Joe Bedenk. After a strife-filled 5–4 record in 1949, Bedenk agreed to step down so long as he could remain an assistant.

  The college was then undergoing another major transformation. Although it had been an exclusively agricultural school in its first two decades, Penn State’s academics had remained second rate. They were, according to Bezilla, “inferior to [those] found at many private colleges and universities. . . . Too many members of the Penn State community considered their school worthy of competing on the gridiron or the gymnasium floor with the likes of Penn or Syracuse or Ohio State but inferior to those institutions by almost every academic standard.”

  That perception began to change in 1950, when Milton Eisenhower, the future U.S. president’s younger brother, became Penn State’s president. Eisenhower had a more aggressive, wider vision than his predecessors and set about to upgrade the college’s reputation, both academically and athletically.

  He believed that with successful athletics and increased funding from the state legislature, Penn State could expand its profile nationally. He had seen it work at his previous school, Kansas State, and at many of the public institutions in the Big Ten. He hired talented professors, authorized athletic scholarships, and immediately began lobbying politicians, cleverly beginning what would become a long-standing tradition of providing them with game tickets. In 1951, Penn State provided 150 athletic scholarships and 50 grants for room and board. Recipients, however, were required to meet the same academic standards as other students.

  As to who would replace Bedenk, it was clear Penn State was going to follow the prompting of the student-run Daily Collegian, which urged administrators to find “a big-time coach for a big-time college.” The man eventually selected was a native Pennsylvanian, an ex–coal miner who longed to return to one of those charming small towns where he had cut his coaching teeth.

  When he was hired to coach Penn State in the spring of 1950, Brown’s Charles “Rip” Engle was forty-four years old and prematurely gray.

  Despite his 28–20–6 record at the Providence school, Engle had often felt like an interloper at the elite eastern institution, with its urban campus and a student body comprised primarily of the sons of wealthy New Englanders. He had grown up dirt poor in Elk Lick, a glorified mining patch near southwest Pennsylvania’s border with Maryland. He dropped out of school early and went to work in the mines, moving up from mule driver to mine supervisor by the time he was nineteen.

  “That mule,” he later said, “taught me how to work.”

  Engle was a careful, meticulous, and frequently glum man. “Rip’s not happy unless he’s sad,” said longtime Syracuse coach Ben Schwartzwalder. He tired of mining quickly, particularly the dirt and grit that were its unavoidable residue. Eventually, he left to return to school, enrolling at nearby Western Maryland College. Stronger and more world seasoned than his peers, he starred there in basketball, baseball, and football. After graduating in 1930, he took a job as a teacher and football coach at Waynesboro High School.

  Just nineteen miles from the Gettysburg battlefields, Waynesboro was a charming town of pretty churches and Victorian homes in the fertile farming heart of south-central Pennsylvania. Twenty years later, Engle would still talk lovingly of the area to Paterno, describing its rolling hills, tree-lined streets, and the handsome red farms whose barns had floors “clean enough to eat off.”

  His Waynesboro teams were spectacularly successful. They went 86–17–5 and won conference titles in eight of eleven years before Engle, somewhat reluctantly, took an assistant’s job at Brown in 1942. Two years later he assumed the top job. In six seasons there, his best team, by far, had been his last. The 1949 Bruins finished 8–1, thanks in part to the play of a skinny-legged senior quarterback from Brooklyn.

  (Seven years later, the Ivy League would be formed, primarily as a means of reining in the influence of football at the member universities. The demise of Penn’s program, which had regularly attracted some of the state’s best players as well as crowds of more than sixty thousand to its Franklin Field, would help Penn State enormously.)

  Engle accepted the Penn State job late, just as 1950’s spring practices were beginning. He was hired with the understanding that he would keep its staff—Bedenk, Al Michaels, Jim O’Hora, Tor Toretti, Frank Patrick, and Earle Bruce—if the university would consider a certain number of academic exceptions for football recruits. “Engle argued that most institutions that wanted winning football teams made concessions in regards to the academic standing of potential athletic recruits,” wrote Bezilla.

  It worked. Penn State would win. And football would introduce America to Penn State.

  The new coach also got the authority to hire an additional assistant. Engle approached two of his Brown aides, Gus Zitrides and Bill Doolittle. Both turned him down. While still at Brown, Engle had asked that school’s graduating quarterback to help him tutor his freshman successor in the Wing-T offense. Hoping to install the same offense for a Nittany Lions program that had run and coached the Single Wing exclusively, he asked the young New Yorker to accompany him west.

  He had been planning on applying to law school, but after considerable thought, Joe Paterno said yes.

  One of the corporate sponsors of Penn State football in 2004 was MBNA, the giant credit-card company. Students work out at the MBNA Fitness Center on campus, and before every home football game, workers in MBNA booths lure fans to sign up for cards with free Penn State T-shirts, hats, and towels. It is a connection hardly worth mentioning in relation to Paterno except as an indication of just how long the coach has been in State College.

  We can no longer imagine a world without credit cards. They’ve existed for generations, growing in significance, number, and use with each passing year. But credit cards haven’t been around forever. Only since 1950. That year, on May 13, Diners Club introduced the first one.

  And thirteen days later Paterno came to Happy Valley.

  An edgy, argumentative, intellectually curious New Yorker, he was, unlike Engle, hardly ensnared by the region’s charm. State College was a “hick town,” he said, and he quickly told the head coach to “start looking around for another coach, because I’m getting ou
t of here.”

  He would stay, of course. So long that his distinctive face became, along with Mount Nittany, the central-Pennsylvania landscape’s most prominent feature.

  All that was a long way in the future in the spring of 1950. It took time for Paterno to overcome his culture shock and recognize State College’s unique assets—idyllic location, hardworking and friendly residents, small-town innocence. Eventually, he melded the virtues of this almost mythical Happy Valley into Penn State football, infusing his program with an aura of middle-American propriety.

  The attributes generations of sportswriters admiringly tagged to his program read like something from The Boy Scout Handbook: Nittany Lions were always successful on the field, academically proficient in the classroom, hard workers, sticklers for the rules, humble in victory, sportsmanlike in defeat. In short, Penn State football should be as untainted as the famously unadorned uniforms its players wear.

  As Paterno’s career moved forward, the atmosphere he created increasingly served as a counterpoint to the excesses of college sports. His teams had never been sanctioned by the NCAA. “Penn State is the poster child for doing it right in college sports,” NCAA president Myles Brand would say in 2004.

  In the late 1990s, when the national average for graduating football players was barely over fifty percent, Penn State graduated eighty-six percent. Ex-players praised him for opening their eyes to a world beyond football. Mike Reid, for example, a defensive tackle who was one of Paterno’s first and fiercest all-Americans, went on to become a concert pianist, a juxtaposition that struck no one as odd in Happy Valley.

  “How many football coaches majored in English Literature at an Ivy League school?” retired Penn State athletic director Jim Tarman, a Paterno friend since 1950, asked. “When he sits up half the night, as he did for years, doing Xs and Os for the next day’s practice or next Saturday’s game, he always listens to opera. I think the fact that he has such a broad range of interests is one of the reasons our football program has been different.”

  Far from being hamstrung, his Nittany Lions managed to capture two national championships (1982 and 1986) and, were it not for the quirkiness of the college-football ranking system, probably should have won a few more. In 2001, Paterno passed Bear Bryant as the sport’s all-time winningest coach. He already held the record for most bowl victories and appearances. He has had five unbeaten teams, at least one in each decade from the 1960s through the 1990s.

  He further burnished his saintly image in 1997 when he and his wife, Sue, a former librarian, donated $3.5 million to Penn State to be used to endow teaching positions and scholarships at the school, and to support two building projects, one of them a new library that now bears their name. Penn State, its professors will tell you, is the only university where the football stadium is named for a school president and the library for the football coach.

  Since 1999, however, with his teams losing more often than they win, his critics have been bolder in portraying him as a controlling coach with an irritatingly pious attitude. They note the secrecy with which he shrouds his salary, practices, locker-room access, players, and even his family. Though there is no evidence to support their claims, some of them also whisper that Penn State may have avoided NCAA sanctions only because its isolation has discouraged the kind of intense big-media scrutiny that has turned up scandals at places like Colorado and Minnesota, Alabama and Miami.

  Some also see a coach whose teams remained overwhelmingly white long after the influx of African-American players in the 1960s and 1970s changed college sports. Many elite black athletes have not wanted to spend their college years in bucolic State College. Criticism from some blacks put Paterno’s recruiting practices in the spotlight. In recent years, he has lured many more African-American recruits, but State College still remains a difficult sell to urban youngsters.

  More problematic for Paterno’s Happy Valley myth has been the increasing off-the-field trouble. Has college football moved so far to the dark side that even the players Penn State recruits must succumb? Has Penn State lowered its standards? If so, why hasn’t the change been reflected in more victories? If not, then why all the arrests and suspensions?

  Through it all, Paterno and others have continued to portray Penn State as a shining example of college sports, trumpeting their high graduation rate and commitment to academics.

  “You have to decide what kind of program you want to have,” said athletic director Curley. “We’ve played against other student athletes that just wouldn’t have been academically successful here, and they may have beaten us. But we’re very proud of that. I think it is the right model. I believe it’s the right paradigm for college athletics.”

  Paterno was introduced to Penn State with a short two-column story and photo halfway down page three of the May 27, 1950, edition of the student-run Daily Collegian.

  The Saturday-morning headline offered no indication of the news’s ultimate significance:

  PATERNO, BROWN GRID STAR, ADDED TO FOOTBALL STAFF

  A Providence Journal sportswriter, Barney Madden, praised Paterno’s intelligence to the unidentified Collegian reporter who wrote the story. “He is the guy who made Brown’s offense go,” said Madden. “You’ll like Paterno.”

  In the photo, taken while he was at Brown, Paterno had thick black hair and a cockiness so evident that it nearly burned through the page. Without his trademark glasses, he was squinting beneath dark brows as he cocked his right arm to throw an unusually fat football.

  Surrounding the Paterno story in that day’s Collegian was evidence of the kind of small-town, small-time atmosphere the coach was entering. Page one’s top headline referred, in long-outdated terms, to the college’s spring carnival, “Large Crowds Throng Gay Midway.” There was a story about a Poultry Club picnic on page two. Gabardine raincoats were on sale at Pennshire for $15.95. And the newspaper’s biggest advertiser was Chesterfield cigarettes.

  Paterno had promised his parents he would go to law school. While still at Brown, he’d taken the law boards and, according to brother George, “finished in the top ten percent nationally.” His father, Angelo, who had passed the New York state bar as an adult, planned to start a practice in Long Island and hoped his son might join him there. He’d been accepted to Boston University’s law school during his senior year.

  When he told his mother, Florence, he would be coaching instead, she nearly passed out. His father was more understanding. Even when he learned his son’s salary. Paterno, who also would be a part-time physical-education instructor, earned $3,600 that first year.

  “I never made any real money,” the elder Paterno advised his son. “But I’m doing what I want to do. That’s more important than money. If you like coaching, stay with it.”

  He appeased his parents by telling them he would try coaching for a year. If it didn’t work out, he’d go to law school. That option stayed in his head for more than a decade. “Until I got married,” he said, “probably every time I lost a football game, I thought, I’m going to law school.”

  On their 342-mile drive to State College, Paterno, always curious, pumped Engle for information about his plans, about rural Pennsylvania, and about the new head coach’s philosophies.

  Paterno remembered them stopping in Westminster, Maryland, (though Westminster would have been far past State College for anyone traveling from Providence, and it’s likely the actual visit occurred later). He said they visited Western Maryland College, where Engle had played for a former Penn State coach, Dick Harlow. Engle now sought the older coach’s advice.

  “He told Rip to go get himself a great running back,” Paterno said. “He said a great running back is somebody [who] when you put him in the secondary three times, you got two touchdowns.”

  Paterno’s uneasiness had intensified on the long ride west. All the cows and the wide-open spaces made for an alien landscape. He couldn’t imagine being here long. He would be going back to Providence soon anyway, to pick up his diploma
at Brown’s June 9 graduation. Maybe he’d just hang around there all summer and then start law school. Yeah, he could see himself in Boston before the leaves turned next fall. Instead, Paterno quickly discovered that his interest in football was at least as strong as his passion for the law.

  “One of the reasons I felt like I wouldn’t stay was that I really felt I was cheating myself not going to law school,” he said. “I thought my dad was upset because I wasn’t going to law school. When I got into the coaching and liked the coaching, I thought, Gee this might not be a bad idea.

  “I said to Rip, ‘How do I coach? What’s it take? Is there a course, something like that?’ ” Paterno recalled. “Rip handed me film. He said, ‘I’m going to give you three reels of film every day’—in those days we had sixteen-millimeter film—’and I want you to chart every single play on both sides of the football.’ When I was done, he’d give me three more reels. I did that all summer. I finally started to realize what the game is all about. And I came back, and he said, ‘What do you think? Are you going to be all right?’ and I said, ‘You know, I may be the best coach ever.’ ”

  But initially he wondered what appeal State College could possibly have for a literature major who read Virgil, Shakespeare, and Camus and who had traveled here with his opera and classical-music records. The town’s population was twenty-eight thousand. There wasn’t much to do socially except go to the movies. “It was,” Paterno said, “a cemetery.”

  “The pace was so different from what I was used to,” he said. “The whole culture was different. You couldn’t get a drink. And the only place you could get a plate of spaghetti was a place called the Tavern. It cost half a buck and they had celery in the sauce. There were things I was used to that just weren’t available.”

  Pennsylvania’s archaic blue laws meant State College’s movie theaters couldn’t even open on Sundays (an edict that remained in effect until 1955). On the day he arrived, the choice at State College’s theaters wasn’t promising: The Fighting Kentuckian, with John Wayne, was playing at the Nittany, Samson and Delilah at the Cathaum, and No Sad Songs for Me, a Margaret Sullavan tearjerker, at the State.