Many Myrtle Beach area Penn State alum mourn Paterno

Nittany Lions who call Myrtle Beach home are mourning right along with those who still live in Pennsylvania for the loss of former Pennsylvania State University football coach Joe Paterno, who died Sunday morning.

“I guess it’s tough to describe how you can mourn for a man you never knew, but he was so much a part of living in Pennsylvania, of growing up there,” said Harry Wynn, president of the Myrtle Beach chapter of the Pennsylvania State University Alumni Association.

Eileen Soisson, who grew up in Allentown, Pa., and attended Penn State from 1988 to 1992, said she began hearing reports Saturday night that Paterno was in grave condition and calling for his family and friends so he could say goodbye.

“I’ve been up crying since 3 a.m.,” Soisson said. “You would think he was my grandpa or something. But he’s someone I have looked up to and respected my whole life.”

Paterno, who turned 85 on Dec. 21, died just 73 days after being fired from the university where he spent more than 62 years, more than 40 of them as head coach, in the wake of his former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, being indicted and arrested on multiple charges of sexually abusing young boys extending back to his time on Paterno’s staff.

Sandusky had retired after the 1999 season, but retained access to the Penn State football facilities, where he escorted disadvantaged young boys being helped by a foundation he created. In what became the most notorious episode, a graduate assistant said he tried to explain to Paterno that he had seen Sandusky sexually abusing a boy in a team locker room late one night in March 2002. Paterno said he set up a meeting between the graduate assistant and the athletic director and university vice president, but allegedly never followed up.

The university’s board of trustees fired Paterno because of his alleged failure to go to the police after being told of an accusation against Sandusky in 2002.

Paterno’s firing, and his replacement by his assistant Tom Bradley on an interim basis, came hours after he said he would retire, although he planned to coach the final three games of the season after compiling an 8-1 record.

When word came of Paterno’s ouster, thousands of Penn State students rampaged through the downtown area near the university in support of him, engaging in sporadic vandalism and clashing with the police.

Paterno said he was disappointed by the trustees’ decision to fire him after he announced he would retire at the end of the 2011 season. But in a statement just before the board acted, he expressed remorse over his personal failing. He chose a word that he had used in describing what he saw as the spirit of athletic competition back in 1989, but this time in a very different context – the episode that ended his career and left his reputation in tatters.

“This is a tragedy,” he said. “It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”

Paterno won more games than any other major college football coach and became the face of Pennsylvania State University and a symbol of integrity in collegiate athletics, and those who knew him, or grew up knowing of him, say that legacy hasn’t been diminished.

Former Penn State defensive lineman Brandon Noble, now the defensive line coach for Coastal Carolina University, said the whole situation is tragic, especially with Paterno’s death.

“He felt genuinely bad,” Noble said Sunday night. “A lot of people saw the board’s actions as a knee-jerk reaction to media pressure, and they took away the one thing – besides his family – that coach loved.

“I played for Joe. I played for Jerry Sandusky. It’s a very close-knit family, and the whole situation is terrible. It hurts your heart.”

“He was a man of honor and he lived it,” Soisson said. As many of Paterno’s defenders have pointed out, he wasn’t the person who allegedly committed the sexual crimes, she said, and through relatives who still live and work in the area, Soisson has heard many reports that Paterno did follow up by going to the local police department but was told the police would handle the situation.

But the fact of Paterno’s death coming before he could be cleared of any wrongdoing leaves her with a heavy heart, she said.

Though the official cause of Paterno’s death was listed as lung cancer, Noble said he thinks the scandal, and Paterno’s firing, played a major role in his death, and others, like Wynn, agreed.

“I think he died of a broken heart,” Soisson said.

Soisson is such a Penn State fan that she has a Penn State tattoo, and induced her son’s labor so he could be born on Paterno’s birthday. She said she met Paterno a few times because he ate at the restaurant where she worked, and because he was a visible presence on campus, walking to all the games and taking a real interest in his players and their school careers.

“I remember him pulling a young athlete out of Schunk Hall by the ear because the kid was supposed to be in study hall,” Soisson said. “Those players, that school, were his loves, his life.”

Noble agreed.

“He truly loved his players. He saw it as his job to turn us into men. It was important that we be good football players, but it was much more important to him that we be good people, well-rounded, well educated,” Noble said. “He wanted us all to have a good college experience and walk out of there as men.

“He was my coach, but he was also like my dad, like my grandfather.”

Other Penn Staters on Facebook today expressed their sadness about the loss of “Joe Pa,” and how they hope he will be remembered for the cumulative good he did and the kind of life he lived.

Wynn said Paterno presented himself as “a regular Joe.”

“He lived in State College, he walked to work every day, and if you saw him on the street, he’d shake your hand,” Wynn said. “Everyone knew where he lived because his address was published, just like everyone else’s.”

During his 46 years as head coach, as Paterno paced the sidelines in his thick tinted glasses, indifferent to fashion in his white athletic socks and rolled-up baggy khaki pants, he seemed as much a part of the Penn State landscape as Mount Nittany, overlooking the central Pennsylvania campus known as Happy Valley, wrote an Associated Press reporter.

His statue stood outside Beaver Stadium alongside the legend “Educator, Coach, Humanitarian.”

Former players who succeeded in professional life far beyond the football field had told of their debt to him.

“Look how many go to medical school or law school,” said Bill Lenkaitis, a dentist in Foxborough, Mass., who played for Paterno in the 1960s and became a longtime center for the New England Patriots. “Look how many become heads of corporations.”

Paterno and his wife, Sue, were major benefactors of Penn State, and during his nearly half century as head coach, donors gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the university, helping to shape it into a major research institution, seemingly an outgrowth of his making Penn State a national brand name through its football teams.

Paterno was a five-time national coach of the year. He had five unbeaten and untied teams, and he coached Penn State to the No. 1 ranking in 1982 and 1986. He took his Nittany Lions to 37 bowl games, winning 24 of them, and turned out dozens of first-team All-Americans.

But Paterno said he wanted to be known for having made Penn State a better place, not for being a good football coach.

Wynn said the local alumni group – which has about 40 active members although there are about 600 Penn State alums in the Grand Strand area – will likely hold a gathering to honor Paterno’s life.

One online tribute to Paterno reads: “Being the great leader that he was, he would not want us to feel sorry for our loss, but instead use his life as an inspiration and strive to be our best every day.”

Soisson agreed.

“I think we should all be wearing (school colors) blue and white, and yelling ‘We are ... Penn State,” Soisson said. “Because we still are.”