Paterno rejuvenated for season

Joe Paterno is beginning the hectic part of his calendar, facing a weekend trip to South Bend for his College Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement.

Penn State football staff meetings begin Monday and, later next week, Paterno and three players will be in Chicago for the Big Ten preseason media days.

When he gets back to State College, preseason practice will be looming.

"My wife will tell you, I'm not much to live with these days because I've got a pad and a pencil (all the time)," Paterno said Thursday ."The grandkids will come over, and she'll say, 'You don't even spend any time with your grandkids,' and I say, 'Well, you know, right now I'm not sure what I want to do with so and so, what I want to do with this guy.' But it's fun. I enjoy it, and that's one of the reasons I stay in it."

In the midst of all this, Paterno found time yesterday to travel to Johnstown to headline a dinner benefitting the Bishop McCort High School Scholarship Fund. The event was being held at a hotel owner by the Pasquerilla Family, Penn State benefactors.

"I owe. I owe," Paterno said. "I'm here to pay back a debt."

It was vintage Paterno. At 81 years of age, with his 43rd season as head coach fast approaching, Paterno retains a finely honed sense of obligation.

He spoke in those terms when recalling taking over his current job when Rip Engle retired following the 1965 season.

"I inherited a heck of a football team. I think Rip deliberately got out of it at that time to give me a shot at it," Paterno said.

And while Paterno's tenure at Penn State remains an open-ended situation, he feels the need to do the same -- eventually -- for whomever might succeed him.

Paterno recalled inviting former head coach Darrell Royal to dinner during a coaches convention a year after Royal had left Texas. The Longhorns had enjoyed a strong season according to Paterno, and he told of asking Royal, why he'd left when he did?

"He said, 'Texas has been good to me. I had made up my mind, when I get out of it, I was going to leave some meat on the bones,' " Paterno said. "Rip left me some meat on the bones, and I hope I can do that."

Paterno is in no hurry to pass the bones just yet, though.

Trips such as this drive from his home in Central Pennsylvania give him a chance to reminisce. He rattled off a lengthy list of recruits he got for Penn State from Johnstown and the small towns that surround it. He also recalled some he didn't land.

One of those was Tom Yewcic, who eventually starred at Michigan State. Paterno, Engle and another Penn State assistant visited Yewcic and his family on a recruiting stop at an American Legion Post Home in Conemaugh.

Afterward, Engle asked Paterno's opinion of Yewcic.

"I said, 'Geez, he's not very big. He's no bigger than I am. How good can he be?' " Paterno said. "I found out a couple of years later. They beat us two years in a row when he was playing quarterback at Michigan State."

Four-plus decades later, only a few miles from the spot of that recruiting visit, a tanned Paterno was in a jovial mood.

"I feel great," he said. "My health is fine.

"I can't throw the ball 40 yards any more, but I never could."