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CHAPTER 1
Life in Happy Valley
The Name and the Paterno Impact
“Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.”
—Samuel Johnson (1759)
“The winds of fate can turn you around, run you aground, sink you, and sometimes you can’t do a thing about it.”
—Joe Paterno (2000)
In small-town America with a big-time football team, life can be different from life for other folks across the nation. When I interviewed for a position in sport history at Penn State in early April 1968, I came away with an idealized view of Happy Valley. Spring had arrived, the flowers were out as was the sun, it was warm, and my interviews went well. I called back to my wife in Wisconsin, where the snow had only recently melted away. She was about to have our second child, and I told her how great it would be to move here. It seemed idyllic, and that even included being picked up at the isolated airport up in the mountains at Black Moshannon, twenty long miles from State College. I was told that airport workers regularly drove the deer off the runway with a jeep, and from there a long, winding road finally led to civilization, something less than an hour away. I began my short stay in State College, hopeful that if I were offered and accepted the position, I wouldn’t have to fly often on Allegheny Airlines.
The low mountains of Appalachia hid much of the near poverty that was only a few miles away from the university. State College, the epicenter of Happy Valley, was and is essentially an appendage to Penn State University. Located in the center of the state in Centre County, Mount Nittany overlooks the university in fertile Nittany Valley. The area appeared to have had no poverty, or it was hidden from the well-traveled routes into the town of about 30,000. It was a little oasis of green. It appeared lush and prosperous, a contrast to the surrounding Appalachia that was verdant but much poorer. On my interview visit, I was paraded past Beaver Stadium, the less than impressive 40-some thousand capacity home of the Nittany Lions, that had only recently had its steel stands removed from near the center of the university and erected again on the bare eastern edge of campus. There, parking was available and cows were abundant. It was home to a young and outspoken coach who had a modestly impressive 13 and 7 record in his first two years at the helm. During my short visit to State College, I was housed on the outskirts of town, with a single stoplight on its major street, in one of its few motels, a Holiday Inn. From there I was transported daily from South Atherton Street to the university located on the appropriately named College Avenue. Along College Avenue, from its earliest existence at the founding of the mid-nineteenth-century Farmers’ High School (Penn State), was the business district, devoted to serving the university, and close by were a number of singlefamily houses and fraternities.
I was impressed that the Physical Education Department had its own library, likely the result of the influence of John Lawther, basketball coach at Penn State for thirteen years beginning in the midst of the Great Depression. Lawther had degrees in psychology, wrote a book, Psychology of Coaching, and had earned the respect of Penn State academics after he resigned his coaching responsibilities in 1949 to become a demanding professor and associate dean of the college that also housed athletics. The small library in the college, the John Lawther Reading Room, indicated to me that the Penn State Physical Education Department took academics seriously, something that was not always the case in other universities, where it might be the dumping ground for mediocre students with athletic skills.
Well before the naming of Joe Paterno’s Grand Experiment of promoting academics and athletics, Penn State was already doing so under Lawther as associate dean and Ernie McCoy as athletic director and dean of the College of Physical Education and Athletics. McCoy, a transplant from the University of Michigan, wanted successful athletics and a strong academic department, and he gave the academic responsibility to Lawther. It was Lawther’s duty to hire individuals across the country who might bring distinction to the Physical Education Department. Thus he hired professors known internationally for research in sport and physical activity, such as Elsworth Buskirk, a physiology researcher at the National Institutes of Health, sport psychologist Dorothy Harris, and Richard Nelson, a biomechanics expert. Penn State’s Physical Education Department would become Number One nationally, long before Joe Paterno’s Nittany Lion football team gained that status.
Still, Happy Valley became best known for its football team, not its nationally prominent Physical Education Department or, for that matter, its nationally recognized Penn State ice cream. Joe Paterno, for his coaching performance, was given the title of full professor in my department, as had been done for the previous head coach, Rip Engle, and a title often conferred upon coaches across America. This was done to foster security within the university, not for academic reasons, for in Paterno’s case he lacked academic degrees and would never teach an academic class or attend more than one faculty meeting in my tenure with the department. Nevertheless, he would become the image of Happy Valley within a half decade of becoming head coach. Football, for a half century before Paterno came to central Pennsylvania, had become the dominating sport at Penn State in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Penn State had produced highly ranked teams and eight undefeated seasons well before Joe Paterno was born and had sent a team to the Rose Bowl game more than seven decades before Paterno and the Nittany Lions arrived there for the second time. Happy Valley was happy and contented at times with its football team well before Paterno. Still, what Paterno did for the community was unusual and gave a different meaning to the term Happy Valley.
Joe Paterno, like no one before, gave a face to those in the community who liked to believe Happy Valley was different in positive ways from other communities. Many believed that Paterno epitomized what was good about living in State College and the surrounding area. He was, to many, Penn State, and Penn State was the organization upon which the community was built. There appeared to be a naïve belief that Happy Valley, this insular and idyllic place in the geographic center of Pennsylvania, was different from the rest of America and that Joe Paterno made much of the difference.
There is an often-noted concept of American exceptionalism; that America has a special destiny as a shining “city upon a hill,” as Puritan Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop put it in 1630 just before landing in America. In a similar way, those who lived in Happy Valley believed that their community was special—exceptional—and that Penn State athletics was the beacon upon the hill on which Penn State was built. Specifically, many believed that not only was Penn State football exceptional, but it was nearly as pure as the valley in which it was born. Steve Nicklas, a Penn State fan and financial adviser in Florida, summed up the picture of Penn State football and its place in Happy Valley: “I grew up worshipping Penn State football,” he said, “the program possessed everything—sanctity, simplicity, purity.” He went on to say, “There was the sanctity of the place they played in, nicknamed ‘Happy Valley.’ It always seemed sunny there on fall afternoons. There was simplicity,” Nicklas said, “of the uniforms with no names and a coach with black-rimmed glasses who looked like your grandfather.” Then too, he believed, “there was purity of a program in which the players graduated and no one got into trouble. But like a lot of things in life,” Nicklas came to believe, “something that appeared so perfect and virtuous as a kid turns out to be a mirage.” Nevertheless, the expression “Happy Valley” may have been repeated far more after the Jerry Sandusky affair than before. As an iconic image, it was important to so many people that the symbolic name was repeated as if it remained as pure as before or, possibly, as if the region would return to being a happy place.
Where the term “Happy Valley” came from originally is not known, but it was used as early as the mid-eighteenth century in England. Samuel Johnson, the English literary giant, wrote the fable Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, when the British were fighting the French and their Indian allies in colonial America. Prince Rasselas wanted to leave the enclave in Abyssinia and escape to “a spacious valley in the kingdom” called Happy Valley. This valley, surrounded by mountains and covered with trees, had the collected “blessings of nature” with all “evils extracted and excluded.” Even with all the tranquility and “all the delights and superfluities” of Happy Valley, the young prince persisted in wanting to see the rest of the world and in leaving Abyssinia “by the first opportunity.” The man who helped Rasselas escape from his velvet prison warned Rasselas about the outside world. The wise man told Rasselas: “Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.” It was sage advice for those in the real world then and two and a half centuries later.
A major difference between Centre County’s Happy Valley and that of Rasselas is that those in central Pennsylvania were never in a locked-in community, except by its inaccessibility. There were no iron gates in Centre County, yet, like Abyssinia, it was isolated, was generally peaceful, and provided an abundance of life’s best. Joe Paterno, when he came in 1950, wanted to leave at first because it was so dissimilar from his city life and home in Brooklyn, New York. But, unlike Rasselas, he stayed and reaped success.
The name Happy Valley was invented for Nittany Valley in Pennsylvania, perhaps in imitation of Samuel Johnson’s region in Abyssinia, but when is not known for sure. Even before the term was created, people talked about this region of central Pennsylvania as something extraordinary. The term Happy Valley was not used in 1912, for example, when a “Tribute to Penn State College” was sent out to Penn State alumni. The writer, George M. Graham, described the attributes that anticipated the name Happy Valley:
Penn State is essentially American. It is located in the kind of a section that might have produced Abraham Lincoln. Situated way up in the mountains, far from the cities, the tang of this primal is in the air. The stuff of which a pioneer is made vibrates at every turn.
Up here among the mountains in the fluff, biting air, in the panorama of stretching fields and forests, in woodlands, where the hunter can still give battle to the bear, life takes a very real and earnest hue and this communicates itself to all those who are fortunate enough to come there to study.
Is it any wonder that the studious athletes in this paradise more than a century ago were in the process of completing two undefeated seasons in football and graduating at a high rate?
A decade later, a new president, Ralph Dorn Hetzel, came to Penn State, arriving from the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. Hetzel almost wrote the magical words when he wrote to a friend that “State College is a beautiful place … making us happy and contented.” He said that this “delightful place” is “on a high plateau, surrounded by hospitable mountain ranges, and we have a complete monopoly of community interest. The little town of about thirty-five hundred,” Hetzel wrote, “has been built up around the College. We have not yet seen the country at its best but even during these winter months we find it most attractive.” President Hetzel, though never a defender of big-time athletics, was a believer in Happy Valley, where big-time athletics bloomed once more after his post–World War II death.
Fred Lewis Pattee, who was hired by President George Atherton in 1894 as a professor of English and rhetoric, could very well have been the individual to name Happy Valley, but there is no evidence that he did so. Pattee was a poet, novelist, and literary critic, writing into his eighties. He remained at Penn State until Hetzel became president and then departed to retire, but he continued to teach at Rollins College in Florida. Pattee, who wrote the words to the Penn State alma mater in 1901, is the individual many claim as the first professor of an American literature as distinct from English literature. Two of his books might have called the region Happy Valley: The House of Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains and his autobiography published posthumously, Penn State Yankee. In House of Black Ring, Pattee wrote about life a few miles south of Happy Valley, noting that in Centre County, “all rules on how to live fail.”
In his autobiography, Pattee wrote of his first views of central Pennsylvania. Coming up through the Seven Mountains from the south in spring 1894, scenes were “dramatic with glimpses of wild valleys, rock-filled like the tailings of mines, varied by dashing trout streams, and all of it bowered in laurel and rhododendron in full bloom. To me,” Pattee wrote, probably feeling somewhat nostalgic for his native New England farmland, “it was a new world, arousing all that was romantic with me.” When Pattee first viewed the scene from the five-story Old Main building on campus, he saw “the vale of Mount Nittany with its scattered farms with cultivated fields like different-colored patches on a garment, with the two visible ranges of the Seven Mountains … with the smoke-hued Alleghenies dominating the whole west.” It surely looked like a valley of happiness to Pattee who, with a full-time position as professor, could now pay off the remainder of his huge student loans from his time at Dartmouth.
Pattee, a political conservative like Joe Paterno, referred to the Depression president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democrat administration as the “damned dimmercrats.” Ironically, President Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration (PWA), working through the Pennsylvania General State Authority, built a library, along with a number of other Penn State buildings, in the late 1930s. The library was named Pattee Library after his death, and a half-century later a new Paterno Library was attached to it. During the Great Depression, Pattee hinted at why someone might call the region Happy Valley. “State College,” he told his former Dartmouth College classmate who was teaching at Penn State at the time, “is known far and wide as the one town in America not hit by the Depression.” There may be some truth to Pattee’s observation, for a federal government agency designed to put the Depression’s masses of unemployed to work—the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—turned down State College’s request to build an airport west of town near the village of Pine Grove Mills. Why? Because WPA officials determined that there were not enough unemployed men in the area to work on the project.
If the Depression was not felt as strongly in Happy Valley as in other parts of the state or the nation, there was a great depression in Penn State football that Professor Pattee noted. When the stock market crashed in fall 1929, the banning of athletic scholarships at Penn State was already two-year-old news. (Giving money for athletic performance and a chance for an education had begun at Penn State in 1900 when its board of trust...
