family when Engle was a boy. His mother, Cora, was intensely religious; she worshipped in the Church of the Brethren, a religion built largely around the ideal of peace. (Its dictum: “Continuing the work of Jesus. Peacefully. Simply. Together.”) Engle worked a mule in the coal mines when he was just fourteen; the legal age for working in the mines was sixteen, but he was big for his age. When he realized that the mines were not for him, he left to play football at Western Maryland College, and that’s where the unlikely chain of events began. At Western Maryland, he played for a coach named Dick Harlow, who would become a legendary coach at Harvard. Engle started to think about a life of coaching. So, if you want to summarize the story, it might go like this: Harlow inspired Engle and convinced him (against his better judgment) to become a coach. Engle inspired Paterno and convinced him (against his better judgment) to become a coach. Pennsylvania State College became Penn State. And fifty years later, 107,000 people would regularly gather in State College to watch football games that seemed to matter more than anything.
PATERNO LOVED AND DESPISED BROWN University in somewhat equal parts. He would say that he never felt more alive than he did incollege. At first, he majored in engineering on the advice of a practical uncle, but he quickly came to know his own limitations (“Joe couldn’t fix a sandwich,” his wife would say) and switched to English lit. The humanities suited him better. He was enthralled by gracefully written sentences; some of them stuck with him long after he left Brown. To the end of his life, he could recite from memory Hamlet’s soliloquy, large portions of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby .
“I sometimes wonder if I could have been a writer,” he said three weeks before he died. “I tried to write some now and again. But I never really put my heart into it. Who had the time? I would scribble a few things down now and again—ideas, lines, you know. I don’t know, maybe I had some talent for it. [My son] Jay has a great talent for writing. [My youngest son] Scott does too. He does a different kind of writing, but he’s very good. Maybe now, after I get through all this, I will do some writing . . . . I hope so.”
Paterno cherished the feeling of being surrounded by knowledge and curiosity and intellectual power at Brown. He remembered with joy the late-night arguments he and his friends had about Hemingway and Socrates, the infallibility of the pope, and the government’s responsibility to help the poor. As a coach, this was the intellectual atmosphere he encouraged his players to embrace. “This is supposed to be the best time of your life,” he would tell them. “Don’t miss out.”
There was, however, another side of Brown University that Paterno also never forgot. Brown was founded before the Revolutionary War, and many of the students came from old money and prominent families. This was Paterno’s first clash with snobbery and exclusion, and such things tore at him. The name-calling in Brooklyn had been surface stuff—blatant, hot, and unmistakable—and it could be answered with fists and wit. At Brown, though, snobbery, elitism, and prejudice hid behind the eyes and was whispered under the breath. Paterno often told the story of the white sweater. When he was a freshman, he went to an Alpha Delta Phi fraternity party. He wore the nicest sweater he owned, a white sweater his mother had given him, and themoment he walked into what he called “that room filled with blue blazers and martinis” he felt every eye turn to him and his sweater. This was the Brown fraternity of steel titans Arthur B. Homer and John D. Rockefeller. He recalled hearing someone whisper, “Who invited that dago?” The looks of the young men in the room pierced him. “I still see and feel that room, those people, fingering their cocktails, studying me out of
PATERNO LOVED AND DESPISED BROWN University in somewhat equal parts. He would say that he never felt more alive than he did incollege. At first, he majored in engineering on the advice of a practical uncle, but he quickly came to know his own limitations (“Joe couldn’t fix a sandwich,” his wife would say) and switched to English lit. The humanities suited him better. He was enthralled by gracefully written sentences; some of them stuck with him long after he left Brown. To the end of his life, he could recite from memory Hamlet’s soliloquy, large portions of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby .
“I sometimes wonder if I could have been a writer,” he said three weeks before he died. “I tried to write some now and again. But I never really put my heart into it. Who had the time? I would scribble a few things down now and again—ideas, lines, you know. I don’t know, maybe I had some talent for it. [My son] Jay has a great talent for writing. [My youngest son] Scott does too. He does a different kind of writing, but he’s very good. Maybe now, after I get through all this, I will do some writing . . . . I hope so.”
Paterno cherished the feeling of being surrounded by knowledge and curiosity and intellectual power at Brown. He remembered with joy the late-night arguments he and his friends had about Hemingway and Socrates, the infallibility of the pope, and the government’s responsibility to help the poor. As a coach, this was the intellectual atmosphere he encouraged his players to embrace. “This is supposed to be the best time of your life,” he would tell them. “Don’t miss out.”
There was, however, another side of Brown University that Paterno also never forgot. Brown was founded before the Revolutionary War, and many of the students came from old money and prominent families. This was Paterno’s first clash with snobbery and exclusion, and such things tore at him. The name-calling in Brooklyn had been surface stuff—blatant, hot, and unmistakable—and it could be answered with fists and wit. At Brown, though, snobbery, elitism, and prejudice hid behind the eyes and was whispered under the breath. Paterno often told the story of the white sweater. When he was a freshman, he went to an Alpha Delta Phi fraternity party. He wore the nicest sweater he owned, a white sweater his mother had given him, and themoment he walked into what he called “that room filled with blue blazers and martinis” he felt every eye turn to him and his sweater. This was the Brown fraternity of steel titans Arthur B. Homer and John D. Rockefeller. He recalled hearing someone whisper, “Who invited that dago?” The looks of the young men in the room pierced him. “I still see and feel that room, those people, fingering their cocktails, studying me out of
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