Paterno (5 page)

“If anything,” he said twenty years later, “I feel that connection even more deeply now.”

He formed that relationship with Virgil at Brooklyn Prep, his Catholic school in Crown Heights. To get to The Prep, as students called it, he would walk ten blocks and take a fifteen-minute trolley
ride. He had to leave before seven every morning to get to school on time. A public high school, James Madison, was only a block away from where the Paternos lived. It was no ordinary public school. Gary Becker and Robert Solow, who would both win the Nobel Prize for Economics, went there. Martin Perl, who would win the Nobel Prize for Physics, went there. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and Martin Landau, who would win an Academy Award, all went to James Madison.

But James Madison did not fit into Angelo and Florence’s plan for Joe. Angelo wanted his oldest son to go to a Catholic high school; Florence wanted her oldest son to go to the best school money could buy. It cost the family twenty dollars a month at a time when Angelo was pulling in maybe five or six thousand dollars a year. “We couldn’t really afford it,” Joe said. “But there was never a question about it. Nothing mattered more than education. You understand? We couldn’t afford a washing machine. We couldn’t afford any of the luxuries. None of that mattered. I was going to Brooklyn Prep, and that was it. When my brother, George, was ready, he was going to Brooklyn Prep too. My father worked out a package deal, thirty bucks a month for the both of us.”

By the time he arrived at The Prep, Joe was already an overachiever. He worked in the New York Public Library; he worked as an usher for the Brooklyn Dodgers; he was a baggage checker at Penn Station. He took the lead in school—straight A’s, always—and he took the lead in the neighborhood. Everyone who grew up with him remarked on his solemn sense of purpose. They called him “the dog-faced boy” because of his seriousness. “He was a fun guy to be around,” his friend Joe Murphy said. “But, absolutely, you could tell he had it in his mind that he was going places. We all recognized it.”

Thomas Bermingham recognized this call to greatness in Paterno. He would say it was impossible to miss. In time, Bermingham would become a Jesuit priest and would spend more than fifty years teaching the classics at Fordham University. But he spent his regency period, a
Jesuit’s first three years teaching and learning to be part of a community, at Brooklyn Prep. Bermingham was still young then, still seeking his way as a teacher. Joe Paterno was the first student he tried to reach.

“This may sound oversimple,” Bermingham’s longtime friend Father William O’Malley said, “but Tom was incandescently innocent. Life made him overjoyed. It’s difficult to describe, but Tom was—accessibly holy. Anybody who had even the slightest sensibility would sense something sacred about him.”

Through Paterno, Bermingham found he had an eye for talent and a knack for finding a connection with students. After Paterno graduated, he reached out to Bill Blatty and (as he had with Paterno) told the young man that he had greatness in him. “It was Bermingham who gave me my love of theater,” Blatty said. Bermingham did more than that: he gave Blatty a story that would spark his imagination, a marvelous little story he would use when he wrote
The Exorcist.

“Berms had called home because his mother was dying,” Blatty explained. “Arriving at the house, the attending doctor said he was too late, that she had already passed, whereupon Tom told him he’d go up and say some prayers anyway. When he got to his mother’s bedroom, he began saying the prayers of Extreme Unction, when suddenly his ‘dead’ mother opened one eye and with her usual brogue said, ‘Tom, that’s very nice, but would you mind getting me a drink?’

“He rushed downstairs, poured a scotch, and brought it back to her. She sipped a little, then looked at him and said, ‘You know, Tom, I’ve never told you this, but you’re a wonderful man.’ The drink slipped from her fingers and she died. Later the doctor asked Bermingham, ‘Listen, could you send me a copy of those prayers you said up there?’ ”

Bermingham reached out to Blatty using their shared love of the theater and the occult. With Paterno, the link was Aeneas. Before Paterno’s senior year began, Bermingham suggested they meet before school every morning and, together, translate the
Aeneid
into English. This hardly sounds like the sort of thing a young man would want to do in his spare time, but Paterno was drawn to exactly these sorts
of challenges. “It sounded impossible,” he said. And so, every morning, the two men would translate the
Aeneid
word by word, beginning at the beginning:

Arma virumque cano.

I sing of arms and a man.

Paterno was instantly hooked. He craved adventure then, as his father had. He wanted a life beyond the ordinary. His favorite movies starred Errol Flynn as a swashbuckler fighting for the honor of some fair maiden. His favorite books took him to worlds filled with danger and triumph, such as
Treasure Island
and
The Leatherstocking Tales
. He spent much of his young life talking about brave knights and damsels in distress. Now he was reading about Aeneas, a reluctant hero who faced raging storms, an unnerving visit to the underworld, jealous gods, and a climactic fight to fulfill his destiny and found Rome. The
Aeneid
’s twists thrilled him.

But it was the question of destiny, the driving theme of the
Aeneid
, that stayed with Paterno for the rest of his life. Bermingham had explained to Paterno that in Latin
fatum,
which led to the word “fate,” means “that which has been spoken” or “divine word.” Aeneas’s
fatum
wasn’t something that happened to him or something that was given to him. He was told by the gods—in divine words—that he was destined to found Rome. How would he do this? He did not know. Was he strong enough to achieve his destiny? He did not know. What would be the price? He did not know. Aeneas tried to follow the
fatum
, but he found that sometimes his instincts lied, sometimes they seemed illogical, sometimes they led him into agony. Sometimes he wanted to stop and give up the chase.

But he kept going. To Paterno, that was the lesson. Aeneas knew that you cannot escape your destiny; you are put in this world to fulfill it. “You have to listen for the divine word that tells you your destiny,” Paterno said as he sat in his hospital bed near the end of his life. “And then you have to follow it as best you can.”

“Did you hear it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I sure heard something.”

P
aterno did not often talk about the war. Sometimes, in those rare peaceful moments when his grandchildren caught him in the right mood—sitting in a lounge chair under the sun, recruiting season over, spring practice yet to begin, the next season still full of possibility—he might talk a bit about what it was like in Seoul during the rainy season or how it felt to discharge a weapon. But even in those moments, he lost interest in the subject quickly. It was not that he carried scars from his time in the army. He had missed all the fighting. He was at Fort Dix in New Jersey being fitted for his uniform when he heard over a nearby radio that President Truman had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He never doubted that Truman did the right thing. “Two great things Harry Truman did. He
saved Europe with the Marshall Plan, and he ended the war when he dropped the bomb.”

Paterno did not talk often about the war: “Who wants to hear my silly little war stories?” He was a Hemingway man at heart—grace under pressure and all that—and those years were his own cross to bear. He was nineteen years old when he was drafted; he had stayed an extra term at Brooklyn Prep so he could play the 1944 football season. He was a good enough football player that he had been offered an all-expenses-paid scholarship to Brown University by a zealous alum, but Brown and football had to wait. First he was sent to New Jersey to train while the war closed. Then he was shipped off to Korea. His letters home to his parents, his brother, and his sister, who was nine years younger, were those of a wide-eyed Brooklyn kid experiencing life outside the borough for the first time.

February 21, 1946

Hi Folks,

Well, I guess this will be the last letter you’ll get from me for a long time. Tomorrow we ship out. Where? I don’t know or on what ship but we were told the trip would take 17 to 20 days.

This morning I signed up for a couple of those educational courses the Army offers. I’m taking College Physics, American Literature, Medieval History and Physical Science. The way they work it is they give you the textbooks and you study on your own and when you think that you are ready for the test they give it to you. If you pass the test you can apply to a college for credits in that subject. At least I’ll have something to keep me busy.

The trip here was really interesting. The Rockies are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You remember how pretty Vermont was, well that’s nothing compared to the Rockies.

I never knew or realized how large this country is. Boy, it really impressed me.

There isn’t much more to say except don’t worry about me. I’ll be alright. The time will go fast and I’ll be home before you realize it. Meanwhile, I’ll be having an experience I’ll never have another chance probably to go through. Good bye for now—you probably won’t hear from me for a month and a half or more.

All my love,

Joe

His letters home flowed with such sentiments:
Don’t worry about me. I’ll be alright. The time will go fast. I’ll be home soon.
This hardly made the young Joe Paterno unique, of course. Every soldier wants to keep the folks back home from worrying. Still, this melody was particularly striking in Paterno’s letters. World War II had been so stark, so certain. The stakes, the enemies, the dangers, the matter of right and wrong, all of it was clear. But Paterno had been shipped to Korea to work as a radio operator at the start of the cold war, when purpose and future were hazier.

He refused to admit such confusion, though. The defining feature of his letters was their cheerfulness, their opacity, their striking lack of fear and loneliness. He would believe for the rest of his life that leaders keep their burdens close.

June 7, 1946

Today I spent all afternoon on the beach and had a swell time. There were about five of us who went down together. The water is much nicer than back home. It is so clear that you can see the bottom very clearly at depths up to 13 feet. It is a little cold but refreshing.

June 9, 1946

The food is still swell. We get plenty to eat, no worry about that. This business about me writing cheerful letters, that’s the bunk. It really is nice here. I have nothing to do as far as work is concerned and there’s plenty of recreation.

June 16, 1946

I am sincere when I tell you I have the life of a king. We have a house boy to clean our rooms and do our washing. The Gov. pays him. Every once in a while we give him a pack of cigarettes . . . . Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to have such an easy life.

June 19, 1946

Well here I go again, the old personality kid . . . . So you’re worried about my hair, Mom. Don’t be silly. The climate is no different and as for not getting enough vitamins, that’s absurd. I eat plenty and everything. We get all kinds of vegetables. Please don’t worry about anything. Everything is as nice as it can possibly be, not being home and all that! I am happy and I get a kick out of all these letters telling me how swell I am.

June 29, 1946

Just a short note before chow from that dashing son of yours. I am still in wonderful health and wonderful spirits . . . . I don’t even ask how Sis made out on the exams. After all she takes after me. All the fellows think she looks a lot like me. The lucky kid! They thought George looked like me too but that he was kind of skinny. Not near as husky as I. But who is? As you can see I’m still the modest little fellow that I always was.

At this point in his life, Paterno would remember having no thoughts about becoming a football coach. But there are places in his letters home where the roots of the man he would become seem obvious. His fascination with practice—“The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital”—comes across in a letter he wrote about the 31st Infantry Regiment:

July 13, 1946

Eisenhower is in Seoul, and he’s staying until Saturday. I haven’t seen him yet, but I will tomorrow. The outfit next to us are going to be reviewed by him. This outfit, the 31st Infantry Regiment, is a training outfit and the best marchers in Korea. They are really good and they should be. They practice every day, and every night they have a retreat parade. Whenever anybody comes around, the Division commander calls on the 31st to impress them.