It’s been a bit more than 12 years since the love of her life, Joseph Vincent Paterno, passed away. But even so, nothing seems to have changed in the heart of Sue Paterno.
The former Suzanne Pohland remains resolute in her love for Joe, her love for their five children and 17 grandchildren and her love for Penn State University. As always, she defends the honor of her late husband while telling laugh-out-loud stories of their lives together.
My wife, Kathy, and I interviewed SuePa in May of 2019 to produce a story in honor of her selection as “Happy Valley Mother of the Year.” So now we figured it was time to visit her again—five years later and just in time to focus on her big day.
Sue, you see, is a February 14 baby, so every year she celebrates her birthday in tandem with Valentine’s Day. (This year, she will be feted at a dinner hosted by Alvin de Levie, a current member of Penn State’s Board of Trustees, along with three of her children, their spouses and her niece Katy and her husband.)
Prompted by Sue’s double holiday, Kathy and I asked about her introduction to Joe, their courtship, their wedding and their nearly 50 years of marriage. Our chat with Sue produced a heart-warming saga of her courtship with JoePa and a glimpse of campus life in the 1960s.
“MR. PATERNO”
Suzanne Pohland came to Penn State as a freshman in the fall of 1958 and she was dating a classmate who was on the football team. He was required to attend a study hall with his teammates each evening at Pattee Library. Meanwhile, Sue and all other female students had to return to their dormitories by 8:15 p.m.
Thus, the only chance for this freshman player to see Sue on weeknights was to take a short break during the study hall. And so he would make his way down a hallway in Pattee at the same time each evening, meeting Sue for a brief visit at the drinking fountain. Joe Paterno, the only bachelor coach on the team, was in charge of the study hall, and one day he decided to solve this mini-mystery.
“I guess Joe got suspicious,” Sue told Kathy and me. “Why did this player go to the bathroom every night at the same time? So he followed him out to the water fountain. And that’s where I met Joe. From then on, it seemed like I ran into him all the time.”
Both English majors who loved literature, Sue and Joe quickly struck up a relationship that was platonic in her mind but a potential courtship in his. “It was a good friendship,” she noted. “He was a nice man. But I always called him ‘Mr. Paterno.’ I had to respect my elders.” Indeed, Joe was more than 13 years older than Sue.
COVERT COURTSHIP
As for romance, “I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I had never dated anybody even a year older. It never dawned on me…And then once in a while he’d say, ‘Let’s go to Bellefonte and get a pizza.’ We went to Bellefonte where no one would know him, and we’d sit in a booth where no one would see you. It was the faculty-student thing (dating between the two was forbidden).”
What Sue didn’t know for several years was that Joe had fallen for her during that first encounter at the water fountain, and he felt this relationship was going to be “it” for him. Regardless, from her perspective, “It was a good friendship. We hiked. We sat and talked. We had a lot to talk about all the time. A lot of it was about British literature, American, French and some Russian. ‘War and Peace’ was a long read, and we had a lot of discussion about how they (Russians during the Napoleonic Wars) lived.”
Many of their conversations took place at the New Jersey shore. Both enjoyed the beach and Sue spent two summers—1960 and 1961—working at a hotel in Avon-by-the-Sea.
By the summer of ’60, the football player and Sue had broken off their relationship, but another guy named Dick had entered the picture. In fact, he and Sue were “pinned,” a fraternity custom that serves as a pre-engagement step of commitment.
THE KISS THAT MISSED
Dick would visit Sue occasionally at the shore during the summer of 1960, but so would Joe—when Dick wasn’t around, in part because Joe liked the man and didn’t want to be seen as adversarial.
Sue will certainly never forget one quasi-date with her friend Joe. “He called and said he wanted to get a hamburger or pizza with me. We went and we talked, and then he was taking me home and went down the wrong street. So he stopped the car, but then he leaned over and tried to kiss me. And I hit him. And I said, ‘You just ruined a great friendship.’ And I got out and slammed the door. That was the end of him.”
But, of course, it wasn’t the end. Somehow or other, the relational tension eased by the end of the 1960 football season and the couple resumed their occasional pizza trips to Bellefonte and their hikes in the mountains of central Pennsylvania.
Sue returned to Avon-by-the-Sea for the summer of 1961, and everything was status quo until it wasn’t. For some reason, Joe didn’t phone for a week or more, and as Sue told Kathy and me, “All of a sudden I thought, ‘Dick’s fine, Dick’s a good dancer, a good party guy. But I’ve got more in common with Joe and we have similar values.’”
Before long, Sue was writing letters to her mom about Joe to reassure her that he was no dumb football coach. (The Brookly native had earned his bachelor’s degree at Brown University.) Joe was working even harder to win over Sue’s dad, ultimately meeting for three sessions before he got Mr. Pohland’s blessing.
But the calendar presented an additional tension. Joe knew that the fall would bring non-stop football demands, so he felt the wedding should happen right away. One day, when Sue’s mom was in New York City to see a Broadway show, the lovebirds met her in her hotel lobby. Sue grins broadly as she recalls the dialogue.
“Joe said, ‘Would you like to have a drink?’
“My mom said, ‘No, I don’t drink.’
“Five minutes later, he said, ‘We want to get married in three weeks.’
“And Mom said, ‘I’ll have a whiskey sour.’”
RUNAWAY BRIDE?
As things turned out, Joe and Sue lost the battle of when to marry but they won the war of whether to marry. Rather than getting hitched in the summer of 1961, they settled for May 12, 1962, after her graduation from Penn State. But even then, there was drama.
Sue was ready to make her bridal entrance at Latrobe’s Holy Family Church, the Catholic parish where she was raised. Several of her bridesmaids had already gone down the aisle when Sue’s sister said, “You have to go now.” Suddenly, the full impact of the moment hit her. It was nothing about Joe; she was fully in love with him.
“It was all a sudden,” she said, “realizing that my life was going to change. I was very close to my family, and I thought, ‘How’s this going to be?’ And I started crying and Dad said, ‘Listen, the car’s outside if you want to take off.’
“And that woke me up. So then we went down there and it was fine. I was happy as a lark and everything went smoothly at the church and we had a great time at the reception.”
HAPPY DAYS
The newlyweds settled into a small apartment at 907 Old Boalsburg Road, and it got smaller the next April when their first child, Diana, was born. “We knew we needed a bigger place,” Sue said, “because when you put the playpen in the living room, you had to walk on the couch to get past it. That’s small.”
But the Paternos didn’t feel poor, not at all. Speaking of their young married friends, she said, “Everybody was in the same boat. And we were so happy. I mean, we were just happy.”
With the arrivals of Mary Kay, Jay and David, the Paternos produced four children in five years, and Scott arrived later. They emphasized low-cost activities that the entire family could do together.
“We walked around campus a lot with the kids,” said Sue. “It’s free, parades are free. We’d take the kids over to the stadium so Joe could see how the grass was growing. That was a big date. Let’s go over there and run around. Nobody had any money.”
Surprisingly enough, Joe and Sue never talked football rules or strategy. “Never,” said Sue. “That was his life, and he never taught me. So consequently, I didn’t know that much about football, and therefore I couldn’t tell him how to coach. And he didn’t tell me how to cook or clean the house. So it worked.”
SPECIAL DAY OVERSHADOWED
With Valentine’s Day approaching, we asked how she and Joe had celebrated the combination of that holiday and her own birthday.
Although Joe’s schedule got in the way of various options, we could tell she understood and embraced the sacrifices that his job required.
“Well,” she said, the national recruiting and signing date was something like the 15th or 16th or 17th. So he was never home on my birthday unless it was a weekend. And that was worse because I would be entertaining everybody for a recruiting party.”
One year in particular, 1977, sticks in Sue’s memory. Joe was off on the recruiting trail but when he called her on the evening of February 14, they both had good news to share. For Sue, it was the thrilling birth of her niece, Katy (the same one who is joining Sue for dinner this year on their mutual birthday). As for Joe, he said, “Guess what I got you for your birthday? Frank Rocco, Jr. (a quarterback) and Leo Wisniewski (a defensive tackle), they both committed.” Her response was a typical teasing, “Just what I wanted,” but Wisniewski became a star for the Nittany Lion defense and Rocco remains a family friend to this day. So all things being considered, it was a great birthday for Sue.
But even if there had been no intrusions into the Paternos’ February schedule, Sue and Joe still would have chosen a quiet celebration at home over a restaurant dinner. “Home was Joe’s favorite restaurant,” she said. “He ate so many rubber chicken dinners at high school events or he’d grab a hamburger at 10 o’clock at night. When he was home, he wanted to be with the kids, and I didn’t want to take him away from them.”
AN ENDURING LOVE
Throughout our visit of nearly two hours, Sue demonstrated the traits that have always endeared her to residents of Happy Valley—her loyalty, her buoyancy, her humor.
Kathy related closely to her, most notably while looking at Sue’s photos of the Paterno grandchildren. Said Kathy, “I loved her sweet observations about her grandchildren. And I was impressed by her optimistic, let’s-get-this-done outlook in supporting Penn State projects.”
Only when the conversation drifted near to the Sandusky scandal did Sue demonstrate heartache and frustration. Asked what made her most proud of her iconic husband, she said, “He always tried to do everything the right way. So I don’t know why they (the Board of Trustees in 2011) did what they did to him. He always treated people fairly and believed nobody was better than anybody else. And then for them to do that to him, it’s hard to accept.”
But her sense of humor returned when she was asked how Penn State should honor her husband’s memory. She mentioned the Joe statue that used to stand on the east side of Beaver Stadium but didn’t seem to be campaigning for its restoration or against it.
Instead, Sue recalled the days when Penn State students had fun with the statue. For example, the time when Joe was accidentally struck by a Wisconsin player along the sideline and suffered multiple injuries. The real Joe was heavily bandaged after that incident, so the students placed bandages on the statue.
Or, said Sue, “When fraternities had toga parties, they’d put a toga on Joe. Joe would say, ‘Oh, that’s fun.’ They were real. He was real.”
