Sandusky/Penn State Thread (MERGED)

[Fishooked]

Originally Posted by BushyTheBeaver

Being reported now that The Second Mile, the youth organization Sandusky was involved with were aware of allegations and investigations into misconduct in both 1998 and 2002 but made no move to limit his contact with children. Some pretty big names on their board or directors.


http://deadspin.com/5857693/youth-or...uth-until-2008


John R. Cappelletti - Retired PSU & NFL Football Player, Heisman Trophy Winner

R. R. M. Carpenter, III - Former Owner, Philadelphia Phillies

James E. Ford - Retired Vice President, Kmart

William A. Gettig - President, Gettig Technologies, Inc.

Jack Ham - Retired NFL Player, Pittsburgh Steelers, Hall of Fame

Franco Harris - Retired NFL Player, Pittsburgh Steelers, Hall of Fame

Lou Holtz - Retired Football Coach, Sportscaster, and Motivational Speaker

Dr. Bryce Jordan - Retired, Penn State University President

Willi Maier - President, Omni Plastics, Inc.

Matt Millen - ESPN Football Analyst

Arnold D. Palmer - President, Arnold Palmer Enterprises

Joseph V. Paterno - Head Football Coach, Penn State University

Andy Reid - Head Football Coach, Philadelphia Eagles

Dr. John Reidell - General Surgeon, Past Second Mile Board President

Cal Ripken, Jr. - Former ML Baseball Shortstop, President & CEO of Ripken Baseball, Inc.

Dominic Toscani - Owner & President, Paris Business Forms

Richard Vermeil - Retired NFL Head Coach, (Kansas City Chiefs, St. Louis Rams, Philadelphia Eagles)

Mark Wahlberg - Actor, Rapper, and Film & TV Producer

Verne Willaman - Retired Chairman and President, Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp.

Quentin Wood - Retired Chairman and CEO, Quaker State Oil Refining Corp.

Richard A. Zimmerman - Retired Chairman of the Board, Hershey Foods

Wow.....


And just think the only reason Sandusky got involved was so he would always have a fresh crop of boys at his disposal.

Showers them with gifts (sorry, def not intentional) so they would feel guilty about refuting his advances, or think twice about saying something about it.

If someone ever did say something, who is going to take the word of a kid from a broken household over an established figure at a famous university?

[BushyTheBeaver]

Originally Posted by Fishooked

Wow.....


And just think the only reason Sandusky got involved was so he would always have a fresh crop of boys at his disposal.

Showers them with gifts (sorry, def not intentional) so they would feel guilty about refuting his advances, or think twice about saying something about it.

If someone ever did say something, who is going to take the word of a kid from a broken household over an established figure at a famous university?

There's a statement on the The Second Mile's home page right now that sounds very like the statements coming out of the Penn State administration...


"The newly released details and the breadth of the allegations from the Attorney General’s office bring shock, sadness and concern from The Second Mile organization. Our prayers, care and compassion go out to all impacted.

The most recent reports we’ve read this past weekend state that Mr. Sandusky met the alleged victims through The Second Mile. To our knowledge, all the alleged incidents occurred outside of our programs and events...

As The Second Mile’s CEO Jack Raykovitz testified to the Grand Jury, he was informed in 2002 by Pennsylvania State University Athletic Director Tim Curley that an individual had reported to Mr. Curley that he was uncomfortable about seeing Jerry Sandusky in the locker room shower with a youth. Mr. Curley also shared that the information had been internally reviewed and that there was no finding of wrongdoing. At no time was The Second Mile made aware of the very serious allegations contained in the Grand Jury report."

[Traitor Jay & the Woodies]

Originally Posted by BushyTheBeaver

Being reported now that The Second Mile, the youth organization Sandusky was involved with were aware of allegations and investigations into misconduct in both 1998 and 2002 but made no move to limit his contact with children. Some pretty big names on their board or directors.


http://deadspin.com/5857693/youth-or...uth-until-2008


John R. Cappelletti - Retired PSU & NFL Football Player, Heisman Trophy Winner

R. R. M. Carpenter, III - Former Owner, Philadelphia Phillies

James E. Ford - Retired Vice President, Kmart

William A. Gettig - President, Gettig Technologies, Inc.

Jack Ham - Retired NFL Player, Pittsburgh Steelers, Hall of Fame

Franco Harris - Retired NFL Player, Pittsburgh Steelers, Hall of Fame

Lou Holtz - Retired Football Coach, Sportscaster, and Motivational Speaker

Dr. Bryce Jordan - Retired, Penn State University President

Willi Maier - President, Omni Plastics, Inc.

Matt Millen - ESPN Football Analyst

Arnold D. Palmer - President, Arnold Palmer Enterprises

Joseph V. Paterno - Head Football Coach, Penn State University

Andy Reid - Head Football Coach, Philadelphia Eagles

Dr. John Reidell - General Surgeon, Past Second Mile Board President

Cal Ripken, Jr. - Former ML Baseball Shortstop, President & CEO of Ripken Baseball, Inc.

Dominic Toscani - Owner & President, Paris Business Forms

Richard Vermeil - Retired NFL Head Coach, (Kansas City Chiefs, St. Louis Rams, Philadelphia Eagles)

Mark Wahlberg - Actor, Rapper, and Film & TV Producer

Verne Willaman - Retired Chairman and President, Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp.

Quentin Wood - Retired Chairman and CEO, Quaker State Oil Refining Corp.

Richard A. Zimmerman - Retired Chairman of the Board, Hershey Foods

I cannot imagine a scenerio where this board of directors had any actual insight/oversight into what was going on. it's not like a Board of Directors for a Fortune 500 company. This is a "we show up for the annual fundraiser" board of directors for a charitable organization.

[jetstream23]

Originally Posted by Fishooked

Stupid kids....now there is a perfect example of blind homerism.
He can't survive this, there is just no way he will.

+1

The pep rally atmosphere brings back memories of Michael Jackson and his trial for child molestation. All those idiots cheering for him outside the courtroom, wearing one glove, defending him as just someone who really, really, REALLY loves kids.


JoePa has to go. It doesn't matter what's in his heart and how good of a person he is if it didn't translate to action when the situation called for it. Joe apparently did the easy thing when he should have done the right thing. Keeping your mouth shut or turning the other way is just as bad as being an accomplice.

[BushyTheBeaver]

Originally Posted by Traitor Jay & the Woodies

I cannot imagine a scenerio where this board of directors had any actual insight/oversight into what was going on. it's not like a Board of Directors for a Fortune 500 company. This is a "we show up for the annual fundraiser" board of directors for a charitable organization.

Probably correct. This is the celebrity board. But it gives you a sense of the scope of The Second Mile...it was no little rinky dink outfit. It employs hundreds of people and rakes in tens of millions.


And there is also a "real" board of directors, a CEO, VPs, CFOs, executive leadership, and so on...all drawing their paychecks from this charity. And twice it was reported to the Second Mile that Sandusky, its founder, was accused of improper relations with boys in the program. And they did nothing? Didn't even inquire into it? If heads are gonna roll at PSU, as they likely should, then they for sure need to roll here as well. Just like at PSU, the officers at the Second Mile were looking out for the golden goose first.

[BushyTheBeaver]

Originally Posted by Banks81

the people that you've seen calling for Penn State to forfeit wins are ignorant fools. This is a non-football related issue.

I agree. But many don't.

[1greenNUT]

A woman who likes young men is a cougar.
A man who likes young boys is a Nittany Lion.

Sorry if posted already. Not reading 11 pages about kid touching

[SONNY WERBLIN]

This is a little long, but it is a great read. There are "layers" to the relationshinps here not previously reported. I had forgotten that McQueary was a State College kid who gre up with SAndusky's adopted kids. We also forget that much like the Pols in DC live in a "bubble", the folks in State College have a huge blindspot for these heroes and legends we see everyday.

Growing Up Penn State

The end of everything at State College
By Michael Weinreb POSTED NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Something terrible happened on my street when I was kid, something that I had screened from my consciousness for many years until last weekend. My neighbor Scott Holderman and I were futzing about near the side of his house, setting up one of those epic Star Wars tête-à-têtes or digging for earthworms or doing whatever children do on nice days in quiet neighborhoods, and then there came a horrible screeching, the braking of an automobile that could not stop in time. The car had crested the steep hill of our street and slammed into a child who wandered into it. I can still see the child lying there, and I can still hear the mother's tortured shriek when she realized it was one of hers. An ambulance arrived, and then a medevac helicopter touched down 30 feet from our house, and they took the child away. He survived, but he wasn't the same.

A few years earlier, back when I was 5, my parents moved from suburban New York City to State College, Pa. They did this because my father took a job as a professor at Penn State, but I assume they also did this because State College was considered a good place to raise children, a placid college town set in the geographic center of Pennsylvania. Those of us who grew up there like to say we lived three hours from everywhere. We resided in a development called Park Forest, on a street named after a British county.

The kids from the neighborhood would gather to play basketball in my driveway, not because I was particularly popular, but because we had a good hoop. In high school, we engaged in epic pick-up football games in Sunset Park, a little patch of grass right next to a house owned by Joe and Sue Paterno. In the second grade, my Little League coach was an enormous neighbor of ours named Mr. McQueary, and his son Mike was the best player on our team.1 We went to school at Park Forest Junior High, and then we went to State College High School, where we learned how to drive and how to date and how to do quadratic equations. We were the sons of farmers and college professors and football coaches. One of my brother's classmates was named Sandusky; one of my classmates was named Sandusky, too.2 I goofed off in the back of Latin class with a kid named Scott Paterno.3 We knew who their fathers were; their fathers were royalty to us, even if we acted like it was no big deal. Our football team's nickname was the Little Lions. There was no way to extricate the happenings at our school from the happenings at the university, and the happenings at the university always centered around football. Everything in State College — even the name of our town — was one all-encompassing, synergistic monolith, and Joe Paterno was our benevolent dictator, and nothing truly bad ever happened, and even when it did, it was easier just to blot it from our lives and move on.

I can't add a lot to what's been written about the facts of the burgeoning scandal at Penn State, except to tell you how strange it feels to type the phrase "burgeoning scandal at Penn State." I know that I'm in denial. I know that I'm working through multiple layers of anger and disgust and neurosis and angst. I know that I'm too emotionally attached to the situation to offer any kind of objective take, though I don't think I realized how emotionally attached I was until this occurred. I never understood how much of an effect both football and a sense of place had on my persona. I apologize if what follows seems disjointed, because I am still coming to terms with the fact that this is real. "What can I say?" my mom wrote me from State College on Monday afternoon. "We're sort of going around in a daze."

I do not mean to make excuses for anyone involved, nor have any of the alums or townspeople I've spoken to or corresponded with, including my friend Brad, who is the most rigidly optimistic Penn State booster I've ever met. There's a group, about 15 or 20 of us, who have kept in touch since college, and I haven't seen some of them in years, and I've never met some of the others, but I still consider them close friends because we share a bond that was forged through football. And I know that, if you attended a secondary institution where football was not a priority, that sounds like an absurd basis for a relationship. But this is why college football evokes such extreme emotion, and this is why schools work so damn hard and often take ethical shortcuts to forge themselves into football powers: If they are successful, then the game serves as the lifelong bond between alums and townspeople and the university, thereby guaranteeing the institution's self-preservation through donations and season-ticket sales and infusions into the local economy. It is a crass calculus, when you put it that way, which is why there will always be skeptics and there will always be those of us for whom college football is (other than our own families) the purest emotional attachment of our adulthood, and there will always be some of us who bound between those two poles.

Every year, Brad sends out an eight-page e-mail, a meticulous scouting report on a team that is inevitably destined for an Outback Bowl berth but that Brad believes really has a shot at 12-0 this time around. This is what Brad wrote on September 6, a few days before Alabama pounded Penn State in a game none of us believed we could win: "We're gonna hang on Saturday. I think we're gonna give 'em a run."

And this is what Brad wrote on Monday: "The nature of this crime is the worst that has ever happened anywhere."

We moved to State College in 1978, the season Penn State lost to Alabama on a goal-line stand in the Sugar Bowl. I was in first grade, and I didn't have much in the way of social skills, and Penn State football was the language by which I could relate to the world and through which I could speak to the adults around me. I drew pictures of Curt Warner and Todd Blackledge; I memorized the rosters so that when people in our section at Beaver Stadium would ask who made that play, I could tell them. To this day, when I try to recall the combination of my gym locker or a friend's birthday or the license plate of my rental car, I think in terms of uniform numbers. It is not 31-17-03; it is Shane Conlan-Harry Hamilton-Chip LaBarca. Those were great years, and Penn State was in its heyday and Joe Paterno was the Sportsman of the Year and State College was a community that never gave in to the ethical lapses of the '80s and early '90s, because our coaching staff would not stand for it. One former player called it Camelot, and that sounds apt enough.

Jerry Sandusky had been promoted to defensive coordinator the year before we arrived in town. For decades, Penn State defined itself through its ability to stop people when it mattered, and, speaking from a strict football perspective, Sandusky was as responsible for the school's glory years as Paterno was. Linebacker U. thrived under Sandusky, and Penn State won its first national championship in 1982, and then won another in 1986, defeating Miami 14-10 in the Fiesta Bowl in a game predicated entirely on defense. It is widely acknowledged that Sandusky's game plan was the difference, that he rattled Vinny Testaverde and Miami's impetuous wide receivers by devising confusing coverage schemes and instructing his defensive backs to hit Michael Irvin until he cried. The day after it happened, they played that game on a continuous loop in our high school cafeteria. It is still my favorite football game of all time, a metaphoric triumph of the unadorned hero over the flamboyant villain. I wrote a long piece about it for ESPN, and a portion of a book, that now rings completely hollow. I have the original video recording of it in my living room, and I have thought several times over the past couple of days about taking a hammer to it.

I remember one Saturday morning in the autumn of my adolescence, the coach shambling along in his parka, brow furrowed, glasses shadowed in the sharp glare of the sun, black sneakers kicking at the leaves as they eddied and then parted on the asphalt path before him. I did not intend to follow him; it just happened that way, so that one moment I was headed to a football tailgate and the next moment I was trailing along behind Joe Paterno.

I walked behind him for several miles that day. Back then, in the late 1980s, it was still a routine of his to walk from his house to the stadium where he coached, slipping across the Penn State campus, past science labs and classroom buildings and parking lots occupied by stunned tailgaters who could never quite get over the fact that it was really him. Sometimes we were guilty of regarding him as more deity than man,4 as if he presided over us in mythological stand-up form. He was as much our own conscience as he was a football coach, and we made that pact and imbued him with that sort of power because we believed he would wield it more responsibly than any of us ever could. Maybe that was naïve, but we came of age in a place known as Happy Valley and naïveté was part of the package, and now that word isn't in our dictionaries anymore.

As a journalist, of course, you're taught to be skeptical of everything, and in college, we tried our damndest at the college newspaper to cover Penn State football like professional journalists did. At one point, a talented young reporter thought she'd caught Paterno in a loophole regarding the housing policy at the school, but nothing much ever came of it. Most of the time, Joe got what he wanted. We grew older, and we came to understand one of the central truths of human nature, which is that when you brush up against a truly powerful force, it is never quite as benevolent as you imagined it to be. In order to acquire power, you have to be at least a little ruthless.5 All you can hope for is that those who do acquire power operate by some sort of rough ethical standard, and even if I no longer deified Paterno, I continued to believe that the monolith I'd grown up inside was essentially a force for good. They did things I found untoward, but I always presumed they did them for the right reasons.

A few years ago, I drove down to the University of Maryland to research a story on Len Bias. I'd gone to see his mother speak at a high school, and now I sat in her office, and I asked her what went wrong at Maryland, whether the administration and the people in power deserved to share any of the responsibility for her son's death, and I remember precisely what she told me. "There was no covering," she said.

I don't know if there are any apt analogies to anything when it comes to this case, but this seems a little bit like our Len Bias moment at Penn State. Our leaders failed to cover, and while they deserve the benefit of due process, they deserve to be held accountable for whatever mistakes they made. If it means that this is how Joe Paterno goes out, then so be it; if it means that 30 years of my own memories of Penn State football are forever tarnished, then I will accept it in the name of finding some measure of justice. Every sane person I know agrees on this. It took Maryland the better part of two decades to regain its soul, and it will take us many years, as well, and in some way it will never be the same. We've come to terms with the corruptibility of the human soul in State College, and we've swept away the naïve notion that this place where we lived so quietly was different from the rest of America.

I have two close friends, a husband and wife, both alums, who moved to State College from New York City a few years ago. They did this because they couldn't afford to raise children in Manhattan, but they also did it because he couldn't imagine a safer place to raise their kids than a little town in a valley situated three hours from everywhere. I don't know what it feels like to grow up there now. I want these things to disappear from my consciousness, but they won't. The place where I grew up is gone, and it's not coming back.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...ing-penn-state

[Big L]

Worst thing about this whole mess is that this scumbag gives a bad name to Sandusky, OH, and Callahan Auto Parts.

[SONNY WERBLIN]

Can anyone ever sing the last stanza of the PSU Alma Mater without thinking about this scandal.

May no act of ours bring shame
To one heart that loves thy name,
May our lives but swell thy fame,
Dear old State, dear old State.

[jetswin]

Originally Posted by SONNY WERBLIN

This is a little long, but it is a great read. There are "layers" to the relationshinps here not previously reported. I had forgotten that McQueary was a State College kid who gre up with SAndusky's adopted kids. We also forget that much like the Pols in DC live in a "bubble", the folks in State College have a huge blindspot for these heroes and legends we see everyday.



http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...ing-penn-state

great read

[RaoulDuke]

Originally Posted by jetswin

great read

+1

[LockeJET]

Per ESPN

[LockeJET]

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has decided to retire at the end of the season, ending a four-decades-plus tenure that has been overtaken by a child sex-abuse case involving a former assistant.

An announcement will come later Wednesday. The Associated Press reported on Paterno's pending retirement, which has been confirmed by ESPN sources.

Penn State's board of trustees announced Tuesday that it will appoint a special committee to investigate the scandal that resulted in 40 criminal counts against retired defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky and led to the removal this week of athletic director Tim Curley and senior vice president Gary Schultz.

[RaoulDuke]

I'd be surprised if he doesn't retire before that.

[SONNY WERBLIN]

A friend who is a local (to state college) sports reporter just called to let me know that Joe Paterno is retiring effective at the end of the season.

[PlumberKhan]

Originally Posted by Big L

Worst thing about this whole mess is that this scumbag gives a bad name to Sandusky, OH, and Callahan Auto Parts.

Terrible

[petejet]

Anyone who had any knowledge and did not call the police immedialtely should be shown the door ASAP. I don't care what kind of legacy is involved. This whole thing is disgusting and despicable. Great so now he will retire and probably be given some grand send off which he lost all rights to when he decided not to call the police.

[Phoenixx]

Originally Posted by SONNY WERBLIN

A friend who is a local (to state college) sports reporter just called to let me know that Joe Paterno is retiring effective at the end of the season.

.....if he lasts that long.

[KRL]

Absolute cop out by Penn St. Show some guts and throw him out now!!!
Oh but wait I should know better, because with a bowl game coming up and
millions of dollars at risk we can't disrupt the football team