Area residents remember brushes with Joe Paterno

For a Penn State student like Mike Warnalis, encountering Joe Paterno on a walk around campus was akin to a Catholic in Rome crossing paths with the Pope.

That’s why Warnalis’ brief conversation with Paterno one day in 1974 always will be etched in his memory.

“My friend Bill and I ran into him one day,” recalled Warnalis, now a Lynchburg resident. “We were walking one way; he was coming in the opposite direction. We spoke for a moment, and then he looked at me and said, ‘Will I see you at practice on Monday?’”

Warnalis is husky and 6-foot-6, so he stood puzzled as Paterno continued on his way.

“I still don’t know if he was joshing, wanted me to try out for football, or forgot that I wasn’t on his team,” he recalled earlier this week, after Paterno’s death at age 85 from lung cancer.

Of course, the great coach — winner of more college football games than anyone — died with feet of clay. It took decades for him to build a reputation as the best (on and off the field) the coaching profession had to offer, and just a few months for that reputation to be torn down.

After Paterno was implicated peripherally in a child sexual abuse scandal involving former assistant Jerry Sandusky and it was determined he failed to take appropriate measures, he was fired just three games from the end of the 2011-12 season. There was even talk of removing his statue on the Penn State campus, like the bronze image of some overthrown dictator.

Meanwhile, as on that day in 1974, Mike Warnalis was left perplexed. He was stunned by the accusations against Paterno, and disheartened by the coach’s apparent abdication of leadership. And yet the warm memories kept flooding in, almost all of them away from the field Paterno made almost sacred.

“He was a staunch Catholic, and so am I,” Warnalis said. “In college, probably one of the only reasons I attended church on Sunday was for the opportunity to sit near Paterno.”

Another night, Warnalis — dressed as Santa Claus — joined a group of students singing carols outside Joe and Carol Paterno’s State College home. The couple came out to greet them, Warnalis recalled, and then invited them in for hot chocolate.

Just a few years ago, Paterno responded to a request for a letter from Warnalis’ son Adam, part of a project for his Catholic youth retreat.

“It took awhile, but a note came back,” Warnalis recalled. “He apologized for taking so long, and told Adam; ‘Just remember, God will always stand by you.’”

Indeed, some might consider the quick and lethal progress of Paterno’s disease to be a gift from above. It’s hard to imagine the old coach either leaving State College or remaining to endure the stares and finger pointing, the media calling him periodically to poke the smoldering embers.

John Walker saw Paterno in a different light than Warnalis. His Paterno encounter involved the public man, the football salesman.

“He came to Lynchburg to recruit J.T. Morris (an all-state running back at Heritage High School, where Walker coached),” he said. “He came to the high school and met all the coaches, walked around the halls, talked to just about everybody he met. Later, he went to Lynchburg Foundry, where J.T.’s father worked, and talked to everyone there. Finally, he and one of his assistants made a home visit to J.T.’s house in the evening.”

Walker, a native Pennsylvanian, was charmed. So, apparently, was Morris, who signed a Penn State scholarship offer.

That ended badly. Successful as a freshman, Morris found his playing time diminishing as a sophomore. He wanted to play tailback, the marquee position in the Nittany Lion offense. Paterno wanted the 230-pounder to play fullback, which was essentially a blocking role.

“I didn’t feel I was growing as a player or a person,” Morris said at the time.

So he quit the team and transferred to Liberty, where he suffered a hip injury, ending his career.

That was another facet of Paterno, the coach who demanded his players did what was best for the team, not themselves.

And now?

“When you’re a leader,” said Walker, a Lynchburg College education professor, “you have to live up to that mantle of responsibility. In this (the Sandusky) case, it seems he didn’t do that.”

Still, it seems a shame a lifetime of hard work and a long list of good works can be blotted over by one lapse in judgment.

At least the statue still stands.