Penn State had a way of doing things in isolation. Nobody had to construct a symbolic Great Wall to separate Happy Valley from the outside world; nature built its own version in the form of Mount Nittany. The myth and folklore of Penn State, along with the insular thinking that went into the university’s operations, did the rest.
Nittany is an Algonquin word that means “single mountain.” The name was given to the geographic formation that sits at the southern end of two ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains and rises one thousand feet above a verdant valley in central Pennsylvania. Various legends exist to explain how a formation of quartzite, shale, and sandstone become a mountain. In one popular story a young Native American woman named Nitta-nee taught the valley’s inhabitants how to build a barrier against a cruel north wind that had destroyed their crops. After she died of a mysterious illness, the people honored her with a burial mound, which the Great Spirit transformed into Mount Nittany. In another story, a woman named Nit-A-Nee built a burial mound to honor her fallen lover, Lion’s Paw. This mound of dirt and rock magically rose up to become the mountain overlooking the picturesque Nittany Valley. Both stories share a common ending: the mountain formed a barrier against the ill winds of the outside world, and the inhabitants who lived in its shadow would know only happiness. Thus was born Happy Valley. Unspoken was the reality that barriers are meaningless against inside threats. Insularity has the unintended consequence of locking in potential danger.
Joe Paterno openly embraced insularity, drawing a blue line around his football program. Unlike other big-time college football programs that have media availabilities daily, outsiders, including sports writers, had only limited access to the Penn State football world. Paterno’s practices were closed to the media. He had one media availability a week during football season, conducted by conference call, when reporters were allowed to ask one question each. Interviews with players were arranged through the Sports Information Department. Freshmen were not allowed in front of microphones. On game days the Penn State locker room was closed. Writers could get postgame quotes from Paterno in an interview room inside Beaver Stadium, or take a one-mile bus ride to the Lasch Building to ask questions of players, if they were made available.
Paterno was unapologetic about sealing off his world, even though it sometimes resulted in reprimands. Two examples of insular thinking occurred at the 2009 Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, where Penn State lost to the University of Southern California 38–24. Paterno was under contractual obligation to give a pregame sideline interview to ABC-TV, which had exclusive rights to televise the game, but he failed to show up as promised. His excuse was that because he had undergone hip-replacement surgery five weeks earlier, he had to get to his seat in the press box from where he was going to coach the game and was unavailable on the sidelines. He said he didn’t want to put one of his assistant coaches on the spot to give the interview in his place. After the game, sports writers on deadline discovered that the Penn State locker room was off-limits, a violation of bowl policy. To get quotes for their stories, writers had to depend on a Penn State sports information staffer to bring players out of the room so they could be interviewed in a hallway. The officials who ran the Rose Bowl, which paid $18 million to Penn State for appearing in its televised extravaganza, fined Paterno and Penn State an undisclosed sum for violating its policy of being open to the media.
Paterno spoke about the fines and explained his closed-door policy to a group of New York City writers prior to a Penn State alumni event on April 30, 2009. The event, called “An Evening with Joe,” was held at the Plaza, just off Central Park in Manhattan. “I have never had an open locker room. If you let the men in, you have to let the women in. I don’t want a whole bunch of women walking around in my locker room. The players take showers, are horsing around,” Paterno told the sports writers. “It’s our game. It’s not your game. I don’t mean that in an adversary [sic] way. It’s our football team. When we lose, we want to cry a little bit or maybe there’s some guy in the corner, griping he didn’t get the ball and all of a sudden someone sticks a microphone in your face.”
Writers who covered Penn State football said getting information out of State College was like trying to get information out of the Central Intelligence Agency. After the Sandusky scandal broke and Paterno was ignominiously fired, an opinion piece appeared on November 11, 2011, in the Centre Daily Times. It was written by Ron Bracken, a retired sports editor who had spent decades covering Paterno and the Nittany Lions. He compared Paterno’s tightly controlled access to “Kremlin-like secrecy.” “It was understood that if you wanted to be around his program in a professional aspect, you did so at his pleasure and by his rules. And that kind of climate is a Petri dish for what happened in what must now be called the Sandusky Scandal,” Bracken wrote. “It’s pervasive on the campus from the lowest worker in the Office of the Physical Plant to the corner offices in Old Main. It’s all about keeping your mouth shut, doing your job, looking the other way at the various indiscretions and currying favor with those above you in the food chain in order to keep or improve your position.”
Bracken added that the attitude at Penn State was to “protect the image at all costs and if the truth has to be whitewashed to hide it, well, break out the buckets and the brushes.” His take on the reaction by the Penn State officials who were notified of Sandusky’s activities on campus prior to the state investigation was this: “One after another, five adult males dismissed it as inconsequential, doing the bare minimum to even acknowledge it, then passing it up the chain of command and getting back to the business of cultivating and polishing the image. So at the risk of an unsightly blemish on the program, young lives were permanently altered in terrible ways.”
One example of the measures Penn State took to guard its secrets was the five-year court fight it waged to keep Paterno’s salary from being disclosed, a battle that reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In a lawsuit filed in 2002 the Patriot-News of Harrisburg argued that the state’s public records law, known as the Pennsylvania Right to Know Act, required Penn State and the State Employees Retirement Board to reveal salaries of top officials at institutions that receive public money and to reveal public records if asked. Penn State received about $450 million a year in state funds. But the university balked and took its case to the state supreme court. The school argued that it should not be bound by the law because disclosure would violate the privacy of the officials whose salaries were the subject of the argument. Justice Cynthia Baldwin recused herself from the case. She was a Penn State graduate and trustee and therefore thought she was too personally involved. She later became the university’s general counsel.
In November 2007 the court ruled against Penn State and the salaries were made available. Paterno, the university’s chief fundraiser, was the highest paid person at the school. In his final year he was paid more than $1 million, not counting money from contracts with Nike and television deals. In the wacky world of college sports, his salary sat in the bottom half for coaches in the Big Ten Conference and was a fraction of the megadeals in place at other colleges. Still, as a football coach, he made $200,000 more a year than the university president. At the time his salary was made public Paterno told a gathering of sports writers, “It bothers me that people have to know what I make. What difference does it make what I make? I don’t know what you guys make.”
Another insight into Penn State insularity was its fight to avoid being included in a new Pennsylvania public records law that was approved in 2009. Graham Spanier even made a personal appearance before the legislative committee developing the law. He argued that including Penn State in the law would affect fundraising from private individuals and companies that would not want their contributions to be made public. He said the university’s costs would grow and employee morale would be destroyed if the university was forced to abide by the rules of transparency. Spanier also said that inclusion in a public records law would compromise the $100 million the school receives in grants and contracts from industry each year. Public notification would violate the confidentiality of donors, erode privacy rights of individuals, and hinder incentive and merit pay programs because all employees could have access to what others earn. Spanier pointed out if Penn State was included in the public records law, it would also have to reveal information about complimentary tickets to football games, or free bowl trips or other considerations it might have offered legislators.
Despite the fact that most state universities in Pennsylvania are obliged to follow the open records law, Penn State successfully fought to keep itself excluded. In the wake of the Sandusky scandal, a bipartisan group of state legislators was considering an end to the exemptions. State Representative Eugene DePasquale introduced a bill that would require all state and municipal government entities to provide access to records, including all financial documents, campus police reports, contracts, and emails.
The insularity of Penn State and the way it controls its athletic endeavors became the focus of an investigation by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. While Penn State has long enjoyed a reputation as one of only four schools never sanctioned by the regulatory body, after the Sandusky scandal erupted the NCAA announced that it was starting a probe into whether its regulations governing the ethical conduct of a sports program had been compromised. Under a rule regarding “institutional control,” which requires member schools to conduct appropriate oversight in order to detect and investigate violations, the NCAA is trying to determine whether the school lived up to its obligations. Failures in that area could cause a range of sanctions, including bans from participating in intercollegiate athletics and bowl games and the loss of athletic scholarships. Along with the NCAA, the Big Ten Conference and the university itself are conducting separate probes to, as the Big Ten said in a written statement, examine “significant concerns as to whether a concentration of power in a single individual or program may have threatened or eroded institutional control of intercollegiate athletics at Penn State.”
Transparency was also an issue when the former FBI director Louis Freeh was named to head a nine-member investigating committee looking into the Sandusky scandal, because the school initially refused to disclose how much Freeh’s firm is being paid. The university took great pains to declare the probe independent, yet Freeh is the only person associated with the probe who does not have Penn State ties. He is empowered to take the investigation in any direction he deems necessary, but it is the committee who will receive the findings and determine who should be held responsible. Most important, the committee of insiders will decide what, if anything, is made public. Penn State also refused to disclose how much it is paying Ketchum, the public relations firm it hired to control its message about the scandal. Later, the university said it had paid the Freeh group $1.1 million and Ketchum almost $500,000 through the end of 2011.
In the aftermath of Sandusky’s indictment, critics of Governor Tom Corbett suggested that politics may have caused the investigation to languish for years.
During a speech before the Pennsylvania Press Club after the indictment was released in November 2011, Corbett said he had been driven by a desire to conduct a thorough investigation, not by politics. “The one thing you do not want to do as a prosecutor is go on one case. You want to show a continued course of action,” he was quoted as saying in a transcript of his remarks. If he had filed a set of charges as soon as one credible accusation was established, it could have ruined the entire investigation. “It would be much more difficult to bring charges in other cases because it would be seen by you, by the public, as vindictive.”
The governor said he was very careful about mentioning the probe in a political context because he did not want to reveal anything about it, even though a Harrisburg newspaper had reported its existence just two months after he took office in March 2011. “I gave a lot of thought to it on a constant basis,” Corbett said. He claimed that only two people in his administration knew any details about the investigation: the commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police, Frank Noonan, and Corbett’s press aide, Kevin Harley.
“Given the nature of the charges against Sandusky, why not simply arrest Sandusky without a grand jury and then proceed to a grand jury to investigate the cover-up?” one reporter asked.
After a long sigh, the governor replied, “The grand jury, as you know, takes quite a while. It doesn’t necessarily have to take quite a while, but in cases like this, it does. Once you arrest somebody, particularly if they would have arrested Mr. Sandusky in the very beginning when the case was first brought to us with one witness, now you have times that have to be met [under] rules of criminal procedure. The one thing you do not want to do when you arrest someone, as a prosecutor, is go on one case, at the very beginning, until you have documented everything.” In cases of pedophilia, prosecutors should develop more than one incident to show a pattern of action, Corbett said.
Ultimately, the governor said, he was content that the prosecutors made the correct tactical decisions, even if they were being questioned by the media. “You have a right to question them. But these are people that have experience in these fields and they made decisions that I agree with—I made a decision with them when I was there and [current Attorney General] Linda Kelly made the decisions thereafter—this will all play out in the courts.”
At a later speech, in Philadelphia, Corbett talked about why the probe took as long as it did. “Could anybody guarantee [Sandusky] wasn’t out there touching children? There are no such guarantees, unless he was sitting in jail. But we did what we thought was in the best interests of the investigation in getting a good case put together.”
State Police Commissioner Noonan, a Corbett appointee, said there were no politics involved in the investigation. It was true that only one state trooper was assigned to the Sandusky case in the run-up to the governor’s election, but Noonan said he added seven investigators in late 2010 because the evidence merited it. Decisions were made out of necessity, not politics: “I can say that I was intimately involved in every decision that was made in this case, and nothing could be further from the truth. Governor Corbett gave us everything we needed to do the investigation and was anxious for it to be concluded as quickly as possible and I had known that because I was involved with it and with him the entire time.”
Pennsylvania politics is a lot like its rain: both have some acid in them. The political map of the state is such that a Republican must win big in the conservative middle of the state to offset Democratic strength in the major cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In his campaign to become attorney general Corbett developed strong support in central Pennsylvania, including from big donors. Many of his supporters there were connected to Penn State and The Second Mile, a fact of life in the region. Penn State, for example, is the largest employer in Centre County, and many of its graduates operate businesses in the region. Large campaign donations to Corbett from those associated with The Second Mile have been documented. According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a website that charts contributions to candidates, almost $650,000 in contributions were made over the years to Corbett from donors affiliated with The Second Mile.
State spending was another matter. Corbett, a fiscal conservative, slashed state funds from virtually every area of government to overcome a $500 million budget shortfall. But even though he knew The Second Mile was under the cloud of the Sandusky investigation, he did nothing to stop a $3 million grant to the charity that had been approved by his predecessor. The money was intended to reimburse the charity for expenses incurred in planning for the construction of a 45,000-square-foot education center. Allowing that reimbursement to go forward seemed to run counter to how Corbett handled matters during the biggest criminal investigation of his tenure as attorney general. As the state’s top law enforcement officer, he had gone after state legislators suspected of using their public resources and staff workers for private political gain. By the time Corbett left the attorney general’s office, that investigation had produced nineteen guilty pleas or convictions of lawmakers and people on their staffs. The investigation had political overtones, and Corbett returned every campaign contribution from anyone who may have been associated with or connected to the investigation.
However, he did not return donations received from Second Mile board members, their businesses, or their families during the initial two years of the Sandusky investigation. The largest of the contributions to Corbett came from the Second Mile board member Lance Shaner, owner of thirty-four hotels in the United States and Italy, including Toftrees Resort and Conference Center in State College. Toftrees runs the hotel where the Penn State football team stays on nights before home games; Joe Paterno didn’t like to have his players stay in their dorm rooms then, fearful that they would disrespect curfew. Toftrees was the perfect hideaway, within ten minutes of Beaver Stadium and yet isolated on 1,500 acres, away from campus and the Friday-night Penn State rah-rah. It was later mentioned as the site of at least two allegations of child abuse involving Sandusky. Shaner and a family member contributed $163,275 to the Corbett campaign.
Louie Sheetz, a Penn State grad who sat on the board of The Second Mile, is the executive vice president for marketing at Sheetz Inc., an Altoona-based company that operates a chain of gas stations and convenience stores in Pennsylvania. Sheetz didn’t contribute directly to Corbett’s campaign chest, but the family-owned company and Sheetz family members contributed a total of $113,350 to Corbett.
Ray Roundtree, regional vice president of finance for Comcast Cable, is also a Second Mile board member. His company and its employees donated another $100,000 to Corbett.
Robert Poole, president of S & A Homes, is chairman of the board of The Second Mile and a long-time Republican donor. He contributed $11,000 and held a fundraiser in January 2010 for Corbett. Poole, an active Penn State alum, also serves as chairman of Penn State’s Schreyer Honors College and is a member of the board of visitors for the university’s Smeal College of Business.
Corbett said his dual role as the law enforcement officer who started the Sandusky probe and later as the chief executive in control of the state’s purse strings complicated his decisions. He thought that rescinding the $3 million grant to The Second Mile or returning contributions from those affiliated with the charity could disclose details of the investigation. “I could not act publicly on [the $3 million grant] without saying certain things that would have possibly compromised the investigation,” he told reporters.
Corbett also denied he had any inside information on when Sandusky would be arrested. “I did not know the date that the presentment would come down, or if it would ever come down, because I had pulled myself away from the investigation.”
Corbett said he believed the mission of The Second Mile was a good one, and that its programs were beneficial to the vast majority of at-risk kids referred to it. But he withdrew the $3 million state grant shortly after questions were raised about the charity.
Kevin Harley, Corbett’s press secretary, did not respond to written questions or otherwise discuss the governor’s actions related to the Sandusky probe or the campaign contributions by those affiliated with The Second Mile.
Meanwhile Penn State’s new president Rodney Erickson sought to reassure faculty, students, and the public that the university would strive to be more transparent in the future. A native of Wisconsin, Erickson was as much at home farming corn and wheat in the fields outside State College as he was serving in relative obscurity as Penn State’s second-highest-ranking administrator. He had arrived at the university in 1977 after earning degrees at the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington. In his thirty-four years at Penn State, he had served as the dean of the graduate school, the vice president for research, and the executive vice president and chief academic officer. Then, under the most challenging conditions imaginable, he took command of the school the night Graham Spanier resigned and Joe Paterno was fired. As the seventeenth president in university history, Erickson promised to rebuild trust and confidence in an institution that had been shaken to its core by a child sex abuse scandal. He pledged to begin a new era of openness to replace a culture of silence that helped foster the conditions that had brought shame to Penn State. He conceded that the insular nature of the school had to change. “Penn State is committed to transparency to the fullest extent possible,” Erickson said in his inaugural message, which was addressed to the Penn State community and sent electronically to the school’s alumni. “My door will always be open.”
Transparency faced challenges from the start, however. Erickson was appointed president without a search, and Pennsylvania’s open meetings law, known as the Sunshine Act, may have been violated when a November 9 vote by the thirty-two members of the board of trustees named Erickson president. The law, designed to prevent public agencies from taking action in secret, requires public agencies to give notice of at least twenty-four hours of when and where meetings are to be staged. It also states that individual employees or appointees whose rights could be adversely affected may request that matters be discussed at an open meeting. Paterno was not notified that his job status was on the agenda that night. Although the vote was announced as unanimous, it was not taken in public and therefore could be considered null and void. To make sure it was in compliance with the Sunshine Act, the executive committee of the board of trustees met in a public session weeks later to formally approve its decisions of November 9. In effect, they fired Paterno again.
The Second Mile and Penn State were inextricably linked. The Nittany Lion mascot went to Second Mile golf tournaments and other events wearing a Second Mile T-shirt over his costume. In April 2000 a Jerry Sandusky Dinner and Roast was put on by Penn State Intercollegiate Athletics and sponsored by the credit card giant MBNA as part of the Blue-White Kickoff Weekend. Proceeds went to the Second Mile/Jerry Sandusky Endowment Fund. In 2001 the university sold 40.7 acres in Patton Township to The Second Mile. Of the thirty-seven members on The Second Mile’s board of directors, the body that oversees the entire operation, twenty-four are Penn State graduates.
Dottie and Lloyd Huck sat on The Second Mile board. Lloyd, a former president and CEO of Merck & Company, was also a former president of the Penn State University Alumni Association. Board member DrueAnne Schreyer is the daughter of William Schreyer, the former chair and CEO of Merrill Lynch and a former Penn State board of trustees chairman. Katherine Genovese, former vice president of programming at The Second Mile and wife of the deposed CEO John Raykovitz, is an elected member of Penn State’s Alumni Association’s governing board. State Senator Jake Corman, another Penn State alum, joined the charity’s board in 2010.
The Second Mile’s annual Celebration of Excellence dinner in Hershey, Pennsylvania, has almost always featured a Penn State presence. The quarterback Matt McGloin was the keynote speaker in 2011. In 2007 the banquet was touted as “A Salute to Linebacker U.”
Penn State brought star power to Second Mile events with sports and Hollywood celebrities like the actor Mark Wahlberg and NFL coaches Lou Holtz and Dick Vermeil. Joe Paterno was often at the charity’s fundraisers and offered other financial support. Penn State students did internships there, and the football players were always offering their services, working with the young kids in the charity’s programs.
After the scandal broke, The Second Mile announced plans to hire outside counsel to conduct an internal investigation into what happened, especially since Penn State leaders had twice informed them about improper conduct between Sandusky and children in the course of a decade. One of the actions The Second Mile is currently considering is shutting its doors.
The child molestation charges against Sandusky were a huge embarrassment for Penn State officials. Having two top university officials, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, charged with perjury and failure to report abuse of children made the mess that much more upsetting. Prosecutors believed a culture of secrecy had become so pervasive in Happy Valley that officials there were accustomed to handling matters internally.
Frank Noonan, the state police commissioner, said as much in a news conference the Monday after Sandusky’s arrest. Noonan criticized Penn State for “doing nothing to stop or prevent harm to the victims in this case.” President Graham Spanier had insisted he didn’t know about the allegations against Sandusky in 1998 and didn’t order a full-scale investigation in 2002, when similar allegations were made, because he was never told they included sexual abuse of children. Nevertheless Noonan blamed insularity and secrecy for allowing such heinous crimes to continue for as long as they did. He admonished Schultz and Curley for having no moral compass and refusing to do anything but cover up repeated allegations that Sandusky was using Penn State facilities to molest children.
Guy Montecalvo, a former Penn State footballer, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The names of the people implicated in this scandal were personal friends. At Penn State he and Tim Curley had been roommates for four years and have enjoyed a friendship for four decades. Guy had introduced Curley to his wife, Melinda Harr. As a roommate, Curley had been a meticulous, committed, and dedicated student who was true blue-and-white.
When Montecalvo’s Penn State playing career ended with his fourth knee surgery, he was given a chance to coach as a student and graduate assistant under Joe Paterno. Paterno’s guidance helped Montecalvo land a football coaching job at Washington High School, where he built a championship program. Montecalvo later coached football and other sports at Canon-McMillan High School near Pittsburgh before stepping down to serve as athletic director. In 1997 Sandusky had visited the cancer ward at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, where Guy’s son, Jimmy, was in a fight against the cancer attacking his immune system and white blood cells. Sandusky brought along an authentic Penn State football jersey as a gift, and he stayed for a couple of hours to offer words of encouragement that would lift the young man’s spirits. “He just didn’t stop in to say hello. He went out of his way to spend some time,” said Montecalvo. “But that wasn’t atypical of Jerry. He seemed to be one of the most compassionate and caring individuals I ever ran across.”
Montecalvo and Sandusky were both inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in 1999. Montecalvo had seen Sandusky in early October at Penn State’s game against Iowa, when the school marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of winning the 1986 national championship. Now Montecalvo was blindsided by the charges brought against Sandusky and Curley. “I was stunned and shocked. This can’t possibly be happening. Jerry Sandusky was a role model as a coach and as a humanitarian. The charges did not compute with the portrait of the man I know. My reaction to the news about Tim Curley was that this is something he would not have done. I do not believe he would lie to a grand jury. I watched the way these guys lived their lives and it helped shape how I’ve operated as a coach for thirty years. Incomprehensible is not an adjective that adequately described what I was feeling.”
The timing of the 1998 investigation and Sandusky’s retirement in 1999 remains curious. Sandusky claimed he walked away from a prestigious, lucrative job as one of the best defensive coaches in the country to devote all of his time to the kids at his charity. Besides that, having reached the age of fifty-five, he was eligible for a comfortable retirement package under new regulations just approved by the state. Perhaps the mystery is best phrased in the form of an unanswered question. Why, after twenty-two years of balancing his duties as a coach and the head of a charity, did he leave the football program? Was there something else influencing his decision to leave quietly and remain in State College with all the perks that Penn State still offered him? Or was he really unwilling to cut back on his work at The Second Mile? It is perplexing that after so many successful years as a defensive coordinator, he would not want a head coaching job at another university. His departure, and the way it was handled, baffled many people in the sports world. Paterno didn’t even seem that concerned at losing his victory-producing assistant.
By just about every account, Paterno knew everything that was going on at Penn State, especially within his football program. He was so tuned in he even knew when one of his players got an out-of-state traffic ticket. Yet he claimed he didn’t know there were police inquiries into his defensive coach’s behavior. Why did he give Sandusky, the mastermind behind so many of his victories, a bare minimum salute upon his retirement in 1999? Did the campus police, and later the state police, ever question Paterno about his second-in-command?
Paterno, who has never been accused of any wrongdoing, said he was unaware of the 1998 report by the Penn State campus police, and the case was closed without criminal charges being brought. “You know,” Paterno said in January 2012, in an interview with the Washington Post, “it wasn’t like it was something everybody in the building knew about. Nobody knew about it.”
But doubts have been cast by those who contend that Paterno knew everything about the behavior of his players and coaches. Matt Paknis, a graduate assistant on the Penn State coaching staff from February 1987 to August 1988, was sexually abused by a neighbor when he was a boy. Paknis said it was “impossible” that Paterno did not know about the investigation by campus police. “He knew everything that was going on at that campus,” Paknis argued. “For him to state he didn’t know, or that he was not aware, it’s total denial. That whole community was in denial. If this would have come out in 1998, Joe would’ve been out, or his name would have been tarnished. They tried to push it under the rug as long as possible. Joe is the dean, the master. How could he not have known? A fish rots from the head first. The image was more important than the health and well-being of kids.”
Barry Switzer, a former coach of the University of Oklahoma Sooners as well as the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, told the Oklahoman, the largest daily newspaper in the state, that he believed Paterno must have known. “Having been in this profession a long time and knowing how close coaching staffs are, I knew that this was a secret that was kept secret. Everyone on that staff had to have known.”
Perhaps more damning, a Pennsylvania state trooper with knowledge of the Sandusky investigation insisted that Paterno had to have been savvy to at least the big picture, if not the details. “It’s a no-brainer. He knew what the light bill was in that place,” the trooper said.
Then came 2002, when Assistant Coach Mike McQueary contacted Paterno after he witnessed what he called a sexual act between Sandusky and a ten-year-old boy. Paterno waited a day before he contacted Athletic Director Tim Curley. “I contacted my superiors and I said, ‘Hey we got a problem, I think. Would you guys look into it?’ ” Paterno told the Washington Post in his last published interview. Asked why he didn’t follow up more aggressively, he said, “I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was. So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”