Posted on 08/25/2012 3:54:09 PM PDT by FlJoePa
I just finished the book, “Paterno” by Joe Posnanski. I was fortunate enough to have the back cover photograph. My Friend Joe Hermitt had the front. Between the two of us we probably photographed JoePa more than anyone.
I read over half the book on a bench in Sunset Park, not more than 100 yards from the Paterno home. Why? I am not sure why. I wanted a quiet place to read and reflect on this man that I knew all these years. This seemed like the right place. I spent many cold hours in front of his house in November. I always wondered what I wasn’t seeing. What was going on in that house and how was Joe handling all of this? Now, this book has given me insight into those unanswered questions.
No matter which camp you reside in, this book will not change your mind or sway you in any direction. I am a photographer and this is the only Paterno book I have ever read. I am not a writer or a book reviewer. I am a man that spent 25 seasons (somewhere north of 200+ games) covering Penn State football from as close as you could get. I also saw Joe at many functions away from the field. My job is to show the viewer what I see. Basically, I am a paid observer. I never had much to say from this front row of history. However, as I get older I have discovered the guy behind the camera has a lot on his mind.
If you are looking for the Holy Grail answer as to why Joe did what he did or didn’t do, you will not find it here. The Book did one thing for me, and that was all I was looking for. It filled in some of the blanks. We all know the core story: Brooklyn, Brown, Engle, George, Sue, Coach, Bear, champions, players, education, age. This was the hit music we heard over and over and it became lore. The book feels like the Album to those greatest hits. The songs you didn’t hear when you were only listening to the hits. Now, we want to hear the album and see what the rest of the story is. I liked the album. Details I didn’t know, insight into the last days of Joe’s life, stories I never knew. It will make you laugh and it will make you cry.
Everyone will tell you Joe was a complex man. He was, no doubt. He had faults and they don’t sugar coat it in the book. I saw some of these first hand. The book does not draw conclusions, it allows you to think for yourself. Make up your own mind and hopefully find peace with what you find. I did.
I have told my close friends what I am telling you now. In all the years I covered Penn State football with all the people I knew, players, coaches, reporters, photographers, workers, fans, students, and everyone else you can think of after doing this for 25 years, I was as stunned as anyone when the Sandusky story broke. I didn’t hear a rumor, a whisper, a sentence, or a single word about Jerry Sandusky. Nothing. I was very close to the program and gained the trust that you only get from being there that long. I heard nothing.
The following is MY opinion on Joe Paterno’s role in this whole mess. The book reveals a lot of what I thought was going on. I honestly don’t believe he understood or comprehended what he was told. His generation could not comprehend these horrific acts. The generation gap is too big for us to understand what he thought. His kids made him read the newspapers so he would understand what was happening. They insisted he know what was being said about him. He did with great reluctance. He had to ask his kids embarrassing questions about some of the sexual descriptions. Things you never want your kids to ask you.
After reading the Sandusky report and asking his kids about public opinion of him, and they were totally honest, he said: “How could they think that? They really think that if I knew someone was hurting kids, I wouldn’t stop it? Do they know me? Do they know know what my life was about?” Exactly. That is exactly how I feel. He never liked Sandusky, that was known, for a very long time, by people anywhere near the program. He would never protect anyone who did that to kids. He would walk to the police station and report it, in person, if he had any idea what was going on. That’s what I think. Read what you want, believe what you want. Many times, in this book, Joe speaks to you about this. If this man was acting all his life doing everything he could the right way, turning boys into great men, and working to improve everything around him. Why would he protect someone hurting children? He wouldn’t. It’s that simple. To protect the program, his image? Nope, if you believe that then everything you knew about Joe Paterno was an act. If that was an act we witnessed one hell of a performance. Nope, we saw the real deal and people were so quick to sell him short. I won’t.
Joe said, let the truth speak for itself. He is the only person to say he wished he had done more. How selfless is that? He passed on everything he knew, because he knew it was out of his realm of knowledge. He thought he did the right thing. He thought he took care of it. In hindsight, he wished he had done more. Yes, we all wish that now. I don’t believe he had any clue to the depth of this horrific man. Sandusky fooled EVERYBODY.
The family says Joe died with peace in his heart. I believe he knew the truth will come out in time. Time the haters didn’t give him. Time the Board didn’t give him. Now, all we have is time. I think we owe it to him to give this time to play out. Time will tell us what we need to know, then we can decide for ourselves what makes sense. I know Joe rests in peace on that quiet hillside in Lemont. He lived a great life and we were lucky to have him for so long.
So, how do I feel about Joe Paterno? That’s easy. I miss him.
I used to write for a college football web site, and I am quite familiar with the NCAA. When I first saw the NCAA punishment handed out, and the wins stripped from Paterno....I knew that the NCAA will lose that one in court if sued.
I am surprised the NCAA lawyers did not brief Emmert and his people about Tarkanian v NCAA
I think Paterno got very bad treatment from the media....especially in light of how Syracuse and Jim Boeheim got a pass from the media.
Did you know ESPN sat on the recorded telephone call between Bernie Fine’s wife and one of Fine’s victims for 8 years....in that call Fine’s wife basically admits that her husband had sex with boys. ESPN sat on that phone call for 8 years...and they are leading the lynch mob against Paterno
Seminole County understands. They are facing their own obsessive compulsive prosecutorial lynching of an innocent man down there in Sanford Florida that in many ways is similar to what they are doing to Joe Paterno. False accusations without a lick of evidence are the order of the day.
It seems to me that JP should have done more to protect children under his supervision as head of the facility and the staff. Maybe I’m wrong.
I would steer you first though to the John Ziegler interviews. Like you, John has no ties or love of PSU, rather he just sees wrong being done - and he despises the media. All the Ziegler audios are must listen. John's the guy that proved that America thought Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her back porch.
What children were under Joe’s supervision?
js retired in 1999 and was given emeritus status by the b.o.t., spanier, and signed off on by current president erickson (who was then a provost).
Joe Paterno had no more control over js at that point than you or I would. People don’t want to believe that though.
He wasn't in charge of any children. He was not their supervisor. None of his staff were. He did not want them wandering around or using the shower in his facility for liability reasons and he was right in retrospect. The BOT that negotiated Sandusky's retirement agreement put it in the agreement.
If you read the footnote on pg 51 and the pages I listed you will see that the myth that he should have done more is a myth. He actually did more than he should have.
PA state law required that whoever is in charge of a child is required to report child abuse. That was not Paterno or Penn State. That was The Second Mile charity and its director Jack Raykovitz, child psychologist. And they were notified as the pages I gave you document.
I guess I’m wrong. Nothing to see here.
Tell that to Sue Paterno and her family. Not picking you in particular, but how do you think she feels? She has devoted her entire life to PSU as had Joe.
Now she's the widow of a pedophile enabler? Because someone on espn, or someone looking for a hit on a website said so?
Like I said earlier, in my state the statute of limitations would have let Sandusky walk with no charges filed. So who's to judge?
Yes I sure do understand...this George Zimmerman lynching by our local and state authorities is sickening. A real bad media witch hunt
The same is being done to Paterno.
I am glad his family is challenging the NCAA ruling in court. The NCAA is going to lose that case...and the media is being deliberately dishonest by not mentioning anything about Tark v NCAA ruling
Thanks for the links to Ziegler interviews, I will take a listen
Thanks for posting this.
I’ve been meaning to post about “what Joe knew” for some time. I’m not a PSU fan, I never met the man, I’ve never lived in Pennsylvania, and if Joe P. was as bad a guy as many here say, then he deserved punishment.
BUT
I was a Boy Scout from 1961-1968. During that time, we had not one but two homosexual predator scoutmasters (one right after the other). Both were fired (of course), one eventually went to prison, but not for acts committed while a troop leader. Neither one ever even suggested the slightest impropriety to me personally.
When I was 17 and JASM, I was a party to the deliberations of the men who adjudicated the matter of scoutmaster #2. I was too young to be involved with the end of scoutmaster #1.
The men who were volunteer troop leaders were all WW II veterans. (By the way, learning camping and survival skills from these men was an incredible privilege). These guys, born in the 1920s like Joe P., were tough as nails and had been places and seen and done things which people today cannot even imagine.
AND YET
To a man, they did not “get” what these guys were doing. Sandusky, his behaviors, what he did for gratification, would have been completely beyond the ability of these brave, worldly, experienced men to comprehend.
This has always been my take on Joe P. Born in 1926, from old world roots, a gentleman to boot by all accounts - I have always believed that this one was just beyond his ability to grasp. I believe that because I have first hand knowledge, albeit as a young man, of men like that and how they reacted to a somewhat similar situation.
Why do people have this vision of Joe Paterno as some sort of Tony Soprano of Penn State? Where HE and HE ALONE ruled the school (and the town).
________________________________________________________
All I need to know that in 2004 when the top 4 PSU officilas tried to get JoePa to retire he refused. This was at the end of a his worst 4-year stretch (26-37). If a university President can’t fire a coach then something is seriously wrong.
He called for Joe to be fired back in November with no due process. I expected more from him.
Where child abuse is implicated, it's always been guilty until proven innocent. That's not to be inferred as a statement about Paterno. That's just the way it is.
Joe objected but was overuled. So, Joe did not have a phone anymore? How about a car? If he objected and did not know anything, why did he object? He should have been happy to give old Jerry access to the showers. If Rodney is the culprit, let the police know.
Read the Freeh Report — footnote pg 51.
...I’m sorry to reply to a posting that is almost a month old, but here’s the thing about this whole situation...it is very unlikely that anybody, whether at PSU, or in the Second Mile, or in the entire law enforcement structure in Centre County acted with any evil intent...I do not believe for one minute that any ‘collusion’ took place to hide Jerry from the authorities, because with so many involved, it would have been exposed in short fashion...no, what the principals in this matter are guilty of, including Joe, is willful ignorance of an ‘inconvenient disturbance’, much in line with the reaction of Bernard Law to the shock of sexual predation in his diocese...just get it out of here, just get it out of here...and then let everything else slide...they let it slide because they weren’t prescient enough to see that this fool Jerry would go on to nearby high school and get caught doing the same thing, which, if he hadn’t so done, everything would still be roses and unicorns at good old PSU...
...and now, we’re left with Schultz and Curley attempting as their defense to parse the diction of what Mike told them, not connecting the obvious dots of ‘an adult male acting innapropriately in a shower with a young boy’...and Curley attempting to tell us he was unaware of the prior Jerry investigation which the local authorities botched...(which is also what Joe testified...sure, Joe, if you say so...)...as I say, these people are not malicious, and they act no differently than many of us would have acted, except that we may hope to have acted more couragously than Mike did...but they were wrong, in the manner that many in history have been wrong, because they thought that rocking the boat was worse than the alternative, telling the truth...
...regarding Joe, not for one minute can anyone convince me that he acted maliciously, nor that he put his legacy above the welfare of the innocent...but instead, went on thinking ‘this too shall pass, after all, tomorrow is another day’, and carried blithely on, up until his dying self asssessment, saying to Posnanski ‘I wish I’d done more’
...an understatement of immense proportion, and in true fashion of Greek tragedy that Joe knew so well, an exsmple of the ‘fatal flaw’ in all of us that can undo our best efforts at virtuous living...
I know and knew nothing about Penn State, never heard of JoePa. But from the original news stories told, I heard that he had been told about Sandusky and did not go to the police. I ASSUMED it was to protect the program. I thought that was his fatal sin, the one that killed and should have killed his legacy forever.
When good men do nothing, it is as if they had done the evil themselves. I do believe that statement is true.
But this essay, if true, may have me changing my mind about JoePa. However, I can’t be sure that just because he was elderly, he didn’t get what Sandusky was being accused of. And the first time Sandusly was caught with a boy was 20 years before JoePa was elderly, right? And not liking Sandusky would have made him MORE likely to turn him in, or even ask cops “Hey, I am not sure, and I heard this third hand, but could you investigate?”
This is a persuasive essay but I need just a little more info that JoePa was really that ignorant abou Sandusky.
Why did he THINK Sanduusky got fired? Why did he think that whatever he was fired for, still allowed Sandusky to bring boys to games and campus?
If Paterno truly didn’t understand, maybe he is innocent. But how could he have been that ignorant? Men have been doing that to boys since there were boys and men.
I’m of the opinion that the charges against Curley and Schultz (all of them) will be dropped. Both are very hard to prove cases - with flimsy evidence and a shaky star witness...but that won’t be why they’ll be dropped.
Mike McQueary is on the verge of a nice tidy settlement with the University which will undoubtedly involve a very strict confidentiality agreement. Why go through all that and then turn around and allow him to testify in January?
No - the University and the state - specifically corbett - want the blame just where the media and the pre-determined factfreeh report laid it. At the feet of the football program.
There’s a reason McQueary tried (6 times) to contact freeh and give testimony. There’s also a reason the AG’s office and freeh colluded to agree to not include him in the report (along with anyone else relevant).
Think!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.