Growing Up Penn State: The end of everything at State College

Something terrible happened on my street when I was kid, something that I had screened from my consciousness for many years until last weekend. My neighbor Scott Holderman and I were futzing about near the side of his house, setting up one of those epic Star Wars tête-à-têtes or digging for earthworms or doing whatever children do on nice days in quiet neighborhoods, and then there came a horrible screeching, the braking of an automobile that could not stop in time. The car had crested the steep hill of our street and slammed into a child who wandered into it. I can still see the child lying there, and I can still hear the mother's tortured shriek when she realized it was one of hers. An ambulance arrived, and then a medevac helicopter touched down 30 feet from our house, and they took the child away. He survived, but he wasn't the same.

A few years earlier, back when I was 5, my parents moved from suburban New York City to State College, Pa. They did this because my father took a job as a professor at Penn State, but I assume they also did this because State College was considered a good place to raise children, a placid college town set in the geographic center of Pennsylvania. Those of us who grew up there like to say we lived three hours from everywhere. We resided in a development called Park Forest, on a street named after a British county.

The kids from the neighborhood would gather to play basketball in my driveway, not because I was particularly popular, but because we had a good hoop. In high school, we engaged in epic pick-up football games in Sunset Park, a little patch of grass right next to a house owned by Joe and Sue Paterno. In the second grade, my Little League coach was an enormous neighbor of ours named Mr. McQueary, and his son Mike was the best player on our team.1 We went to school at Park Forest Junior High, and then we went to State College High School, where we learned how to drive and how to date and how to do quadratic equations. We were the sons of farmers and college professors and football coaches. One of my brother's classmates was named Sandusky; one of my classmates was named Sandusky, too.2 I goofed off in the back of Latin class with a kid named Scott Paterno.3 We knew who their fathers were; their fathers were royalty to us, even if we acted like it was no big deal. Our football team's nickname was the Little Lions. There was no way to extricate the happenings at our school from the happenings at the university, and the happenings at the university always centered around football. Everything in State College — even the name of our town — was one all-encompassing, synergistic monolith, and Joe Paterno was our benevolent dictator, and nothing truly bad ever happened, and even when it did, it was easier just to blot it from our lives and move on.

I can't add a lot to what's been written about the facts of the burgeoning scandal at Penn State, except to tell you how strange it feels to type the phrase "burgeoning scandal at Penn State." I know that I'm in denial. I know that I'm working through multiple layers of anger and disgust and neurosis and angst. I know that I'm too emotionally attached to the situation to offer any kind of objective take, though I don't think I realized how emotionally attached I was until this occurred. I never understood how much of an effect both football and a sense of place had on my persona. I apologize if what follows seems disjointed, because I am still coming to terms with the fact that this is real. "What can I say?" my mom wrote me from State College on Monday afternoon. "We're sort of going around in a daze."

I do not mean to make excuses for anyone involved, nor have any of the alums or townspeople I've spoken to or corresponded with, including my friend Brad, who is the most rigidly optimistic Penn State booster I've ever met. There's a group, about 15 or 20 of us, who have kept in touch since college, and I haven't seen some of them in years, and I've never met some of the others, but I still consider them close friends because we share a bond that was forged through football. And I know that, if you attended a secondary institution where football was not a priority, that sounds like an absurd basis for a relationship. But this is why college football evokes such extreme emotion, and this is why schools work so damn hard and often take ethical shortcuts to forge themselves into football powers: If they are successful, then the game serves as the lifelong bond between alums and townspeople and the university, thereby guaranteeing the institution's self-preservation through donations and season-ticket sales and infusions into the local economy. It is a crass calculus, when you put it that way, which is why there will always be skeptics and there will always be those of us for whom college football is (other than our own families) the purest emotional attachment of our adulthood, and there will always be some of us who bound between those two poles.

Every year, Brad sends out an eight-page e-mail, a meticulous scouting report on a team that is inevitably destined for an Outback Bowl berth but that Brad believes really has a shot at 12-0 this time around. This is what Brad wrote on September 6, a few days before Alabama pounded Penn State in a game none of us believed we could win: "We're gonna hang on Saturday. I think we're gonna give 'em a run."

And this is what Brad wrote on Monday: "The nature of this crime is the worst that has ever happened anywhere."

We moved to State College in 1978, the season Penn State lost to Alabama on a goal-line stand in the Sugar Bowl. I was in first grade, and I didn't have much in the way of social skills, and Penn State football was the language by which I could relate to the world and through which I could speak to the adults around me. I drew pictures of Curt Warner and Todd Blackledge; I memorized the rosters so that when people in our section at Beaver Stadium would ask who made that play, I could tell them. To this day, when I try to recall the combination of my gym locker or a friend's birthday or the license plate of my rental car, I think in terms of uniform numbers. It is not 31-17-03; it is Shane Conlan-Harry Hamilton-Chip LaBarca. Those were great years, and Penn State was in its heyday and Joe Paterno was the Sportsman of the Year and State College was a community that never gave in to the ethical lapses of the '80s and early '90s, because our coaching staff would not stand for it. One former player called it Camelot, and that sounds apt enough.

Jerry Sandusky had been promoted to defensive coordinator the year before we arrived in town. For decades, Penn State defined itself through its ability to stop people when it mattered, and, speaking from a strict football perspective, Sandusky was as responsible for the school's glory years as Paterno was. Linebacker U. thrived under Sandusky, and Penn State won its first national championship in 1982, and then won another in 1986, defeating Miami 14-10 in the Fiesta Bowl in a game predicated entirely on defense. It is widely acknowledged that Sandusky's game plan was the difference, that he rattled Vinny Testaverde and Miami's impetuous wide receivers by devising confusing coverage schemes and instructing his defensive backs to hit Michael Irvin until he cried. The day after it happened, they played that game on a continuous loop in our high school cafeteria. It is still my favorite football game of all time, a metaphoric triumph of the unadorned hero over the flamboyant villain. I wrote a long piece about it for ESPN, and a portion of a book, that now rings completely hollow. I have the original video recording of it in my living room, and I have thought several times over the past couple of days about taking a hammer to it.

I remember one Saturday morning in the autumn of my adolescence, the coach shambling along in his parka, brow furrowed, glasses shadowed in the sharp glare of the sun, black sneakers kicking at the leaves as they eddied and then parted on the asphalt path before him. I did not intend to follow him; it just happened that way, so that one moment I was headed to a football tailgate and the next moment I was trailing along behind Joe Paterno.

I walked behind him for several miles that day. Back then, in the late 1980s, it was still a routine of his to walk from his house to the stadium where he coached, slipping across the Penn State campus, past science labs and classroom buildings and parking lots occupied by stunned tailgaters who could never quite get over the fact that it was really him. Sometimes we were guilty of regarding him as more deity than man,4 as if he presided over us in mythological stand-up form. He was as much our own conscience as he was a football coach, and we made that pact and imbued him with that sort of power because we believed he would wield it more responsibly than any of us ever could. Maybe that was naïve, but we came of age in a place known as Happy Valley and naïveté was part of the package, and now that word isn't in our dictionaries anymore.

As a journalist, of course, you're taught to be skeptical of everything, and in college, we tried our damndest at the college newspaper to cover Penn State football like professional journalists did. At one point, a talented young reporter thought she'd caught Paterno in a loophole regarding the housing policy at the school, but nothing much ever came of it. Most of the time, Joe got what he wanted. We grew older, and we came to understand one of the central truths of human nature, which is that when you brush up against a truly powerful force, it is never quite as benevolent as you imagined it to be. In order to acquire power, you have to be at least a little ruthless.5 All you can hope for is that those who do acquire power operate by some sort of rough ethical standard, and even if I no longer deified Paterno, I continued to believe that the monolith I'd grown up inside was essentially a force for good. They did things I found untoward, but I always presumed they did them for the right reasons.

A few years ago, I drove down to the University of Maryland to research a story on Len Bias. I'd gone to see his mother speak at a high school, and now I sat in her office, and I asked her what went wrong at Maryland, whether the administration and the people in power deserved to share any of the responsibility for her son's death, and I remember precisely what she told me. "There was no covering," she said.

I don't know if there are any apt analogies to anything when it comes to this case, but this seems a little bit like our Len Bias moment at Penn State. Our leaders failed to cover, and while they deserve the benefit of due process, they deserve to be held accountable for whatever mistakes they made. If it means that this is how Joe Paterno goes out, then so be it; if it means that 30 years of my own memories of Penn State football are forever tarnished, then I will accept it in the name of finding some measure of justice. Every sane person I know agrees on this. It took Maryland the better part of two decades to regain its soul, and it will take us many years, as well, and in some way it will never be the same. We've come to terms with the corruptibility of the human soul in State College, and we've swept away the naïve notion that this place where we lived so quietly was different from the rest of America.

I have two close friends, a husband and wife, both alums, who moved to State College from New York City a few years ago. They did this because they couldn't afford to raise children in Manhattan, but they also did it because he couldn't imagine a safer place to raise their kids than a little town in a valley situated three hours from everywhere. I don't know what it feels like to grow up there now. I want these things to disappear from my consciousness, but they won't. The place where I grew up is gone, and it's not coming back.

Michael Weinreb is a Grantland staff writer and the author, most recently, of Bigger Than the Game: Bo, Boz, the Punky QB and How the '80s Created the Modern Athlete.

The sum of Joe Paterno is not his decision years ago to report the shower incident to his athletic director, then apparently trust the system to work.

Dear nynychik.

I am old enough that I have the cynicism that often comes with decades. I know that men are flawed; all of them, except for One who died on a cross. I had heroes in my childhood, but I have very, very few today. Last Sunday, I had one hero in college football. His name was Joe Paterno. I never attended Penn State, nor did my parents, nor siblings, nor any relative. I've lived around the country, but never in or particularly near Pennsylvania. As I said above, when I was boy in Seattle, I put black electrical tape on my backyard football helmet so I could be one of JoePa's Penn State players. I liked JoePa then.

As a man, I grew to respect JoePa, almost love him, with each passing year of the debauchery in college sports because Joe Paterno was, in my eyes, a moral, decent, good man.

I'm genetically a Texan. I'll make a contract with a handshake. When I say somebody is a "good man," I pack a lot in that one word, "good." When I say "a moral, decent, good man" . . . well . . . as I said, I have few heros.

I didn't say he was a legalistic man. Legalism is a refuge for cowards and scoundrels. A good man does what is right and morally sound, not what is minimally required of him or that which legally gives him cover.

I knew he was powerful. He earned that power through respect and (I'm not stupid) through winning college football games. But he didn't seem to abuse his power.

On Monday morning of this week, I read the Grand Jury presentment regarding Penn State coach emeritus Jerry Sandusky. On Tuesday, I read the Grand Jury report. I don't know if you have read them yet.

What you will discover is that something grotesquely obscene happened at Penn State over a period of years, probably since 1994, and at least since 1998. It didn't happen once. Or twice. It didn't happen unnoticed.

Most of the attention is about a single incident of anal rape of a pre-teen boy that took place in the Penn State football locker room showers in 2002. But that's in the middle of the story.

The story apparently begins as early as 1994 or earlier, but let's start in 1998. Jerry Sandusky worked with troubled youth as part of a charity called The Second Mile, which he helped found years earlier; Joe Paterno was actually on the board at some point, perhaps as a honorary trustee. Jerry Sandusky played for Joe Paterno from 1963-65, and served on his coaching staff starting in 1969. By 1998, Sandusky had served as defensive coordinator for years, was a close personal friend of Joe Paterno's (for almost thirty years), and was the 'heir apparent' to replace Joe Paterno. However, in 1998, the University Police conducted an investigation into incidents (plural) involving Sandusky showering with preteen boys in the Penn State football locker room showers. Sandusky would have been in his mid-50s. There's nothing appropriate about that. Forget molestation. When you're a man in your 50s working with troubled boys, showering naked with them is not therapy. It's wrong.

Based on complaints by a mother, a DA looked into allegations of molestation but decided he did not have enough evidence. I may be wrong (I do not have the stomach to go back and read the reports again), but I do not believe the University Police report file was available to the DA, and I do not believe the University Police reported Sandusky to legal authorities.

This was Paterno's defensive coordinator and friend and assistant coach of thirty years. It was the Penn State football locker room. What's fairly clear is that Sandusky's problem with little boys was widely known after (or before) the investigation. It would be disrespectful of Joe Paterno to think he was so naive and disrepected that everyone else would know and not tell Paterno.

Well, within months, Sandusky unexpectedly announced his early retirement. The official story is that Paterno told him that he would never be the head coach at Penn State. That's probably true. And he was probably told that because . . . he showered with little boys.

Instead of disassociating completely with Sandusky, Penn State or Joe Paterno - because Joe Paterno was, as far as anyone who knew and understood the program believes, the athletic department in 1999 - decided to grant Sandusky 'emeritus' status.

Instead of disassociating with him, they gave him an office in the athletic building, with keys to the facilities, a parking space, a phone, internet access, discounts on campus, a tuition discount for himself and his adopted children, the rights to hold sleepover youth athletic camps on campus, and the rights to bring boys with him to insider football program events, such as sidelines and pre-game banquets. If you envision a child molester as an old man luring boys with candy, then Sandusky's candy was bringing boys to the Penn State facilities and inside the football program, and Penn State - with Paterno's knowledge, or at Paterno's instruction - gave Sandusky the candy.

I have to believe that Paterno, as a decent man, could have called the President of Penn State into his home (he was that powerful) and said "no man who showers with boys is going to have access to MY football facilities." At the very least, Paterno could have kept Sandusky from bringing boys to special football events, such as pre-game banquets.

In 2000, a janitor caught Sandusky in the football showers again, performing oral sodomy on a preteen boy. He didn't report it to the police because he was 'too scared." Whether scared of long-time hero Sandusky (whose defense won the 1987 Orange Bowl National Championship), or bringing shame on Penn State, or reporting Joe Paterno's friend of three decades, we don't know. But I find it difficult to believe that Joe Paterno, who ran his program so that he knew if his boys broke curfew, even if it was in a town twenty miles away, would have heard that his good friend and former coach had another boy in the football showers. It was never reported and Joe Paterno apparently did nothing to stop Sandusky from bringing boys around to football events, to keep Sandusky from having access to the football showers, or . . . anything.

In 2002, Mike McQueary, former star QB for Penn State and then a graduate assistant, walked in on Sandusky anally raping a preteen boy in the football showers at 9:30 on a Friday night. McQueary didn't stop Sandusky (who had been a coach when McQueary played) or rescue the boy. He didn't call the police. He called his father and the decided that McQueary should report the incident to Paterno . . . the next morning. McQueary did.

Here's an open part of the story. Paterno says he was only told that there was "fondling" and "maybe something of a sexual nature." McQueary told his father it was anal rape. McQueary told the AD, Curley, and the Senior VP of Business and Finance, it was anal rape. Why wouldn't he tell Paterno that?

Both the Grand Jury presentment and the GJ findings are very careful not to disclosure what McQueary says he told Joe Paterno.

Paterno waited one day to call the AD, Curley, to whom he 'reports' on the organizational chart. Of course, in real life in 2002, everybody really reported to Paterno. Paterno was the man with the power that came with respect, 34 years of coaching, and National Championships.

Curley and Schultz did nothing. They never reported the incident to the University Police, state youth protection, or any law enforcement. Sandusky kept his office in the Athletic building and emeritus status until this Sunday. He held sleepover camps for boys (although on the University's other campus) through the Athletic Department until 2008.

Joe Paterno says "I fulfilled my legal duty. I reported to my superior." And then he never followed up. He never asked about police involvement, or why Sandusky was still around, or hosting camps, or why Sandusky wasn't charged with anything. Nobody at Penn State even tried to find out the identity of the boy who was raped.

The Pennsylvania State Police Commission stated publicly that Joe Paterno had a moral duty to report this to the police.

But for nine years, Joe Paterno, whom I believed to be a righteous, decent, moral man, hid behind the "I told my superior" and watched as Sandusky still roamed freely. He either didn't ask any questions . . . or he didn't care what was heard.

And now, we find that as of yesterday, there are twenty know victims of Sandusky, while there were only eight in the indictment. And we wonder why the indictment and these details were held until Joe Paterno could pass the All-Time Wins As A Division I Coach record. Because they were held.

There are plenty of people to blame. Penn State's president should resign (I haven't even discussed his involvement). Mike McQueary should never coach again.

But it wasn't an incident in the showers in 2002. It was an unspeakable pattern of activities taking place at Penn State since at least 1998, and hushed up. And Joe Paterno knew and didn't speak.

I'm left having to make one of two assumptions. Either my hero placed a friendship of 30+ years and the desire not to tarnish the Penn State name over the safety of preteen boys, and did that since Sandusky was given emeritus status and allowed to bring boys to football events back in 1998, without Joe Paterno taking a stand or speaking out . . . or Joe Paterno was a clueless, incompetent figurehead dating back to 1998, and while everyone around him knew that Joe's friend was molesting boys in the showers of Joe's football program, Joe was the only person who didn't know about it.

And suddenly, these programs who give cars and cash to players? When you have everyone from the President of the University on down apparently involved in some way actively covering up child rape, or sweeping it under the rug, or ignoring it, or saying "it kicked it up the ladder, so why look at me, I didn't need to speak out?", those cars and cash are not even in the same category.

When I read about a veteran of D-Day dying, I grieve. This is not quite the same. But I lost my youth. I lost my innocence. I realize that power does corrupt. I lost JoePa. Now, he's an old man who sat silent for fourteen years or more, allowing more boys to be molested, to protect a friend, or the reputation of Penn State and its football program.

This reminds me of when my Scoutmaster died.

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