Joe Paterno is being eulogized today; those closest to him will have to say goodbye. The coach will pass by his football sanctuary one last time, travel the streets of downtown State College, and then he will be buried beneath the earth, and there will be finality to it all.
Thousands are expected to line the streets during the processional around town. Around 3 p.m. Wednesday, the cortege will leave Pasquerilla Spiritual Center and travel down Curtin Road and pass Beaver Stadium before turning right onto Porter Road and then right on College Avenue, heading west through downtown State College and then to the cemetery and burial site.
Pasquerilla Spiritual Center estimated about 27,000 visitors for Tuesday’s viewing. Many more are expected to pay their last respects to the coach until noon Wednesday. A private funeral service is scheduled to start at 2 p.m.
The burial is private, but if the events surrounding the passing of another football coach of Paterno’s stature is any indication, that may be impossible. It would come as no surprise if the scene Wednesday reflects the scene on Jan. 28, 1983, the day Paul ‘Bear’ William Bryant was laid to rest at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham, Ala.
Bryant, the former Alabama coach, is perhaps one of the only college coaches to equal the impact on a community and sport that Paterno would come to have at Penn State.
Paterno said it himself in Charles Reagan Wilson’s essay. “The Death of Bear Bryant: Myth and Ritual in the Modern South” is one of the definitive works on the events surrounding Bryant’s death.
‘He was a monumental figure in intercollegiate athletics, a man who set standards not easily attainable by men,” Paterno said at the time. ‘He was a giant and we will miss him.”
Bryant’s funeral service was held in Tuscaloosa at the First United Methodist Church, where Rev. Joe Elmore started by reading the One Hundredth Psalm, according to Wilson, the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.
Elmore spoke of Bryant’s “ability to teach and motivate people – to teach them important lessons of life.’ There was organ music, Wilson writes, but no hymns sung or eulogies read.
Like Paterno’s will Wednesday, Bryant’s cortege traveled through town and past the football stadium. It then merged onto the Interstate to travel to Birmingham. According to news reports, 400 cars lined up bumper-to-bumper by the time Bryant’s cortege reached the stadium.
Outside, men wore houndstooth hats in honor of Bryant. Many observers in State College on Tuesday wore a traditional Paterno look — rolled up khakis and black shoes. Others wore blue and white in the same fashion crimson and white was more popular than Sunday clothes.
A normal scene was a tunnel of people, three-to-four deep, lining the route of Bryant’s procession. In some places, Wilson writes, the line was 10 people deep. Most businesses closed for the day, and school was dismissed.
One of the most astonishing facts: When Bryant’s cortege was traveling on the Interstate to Birmingham, it’s estimated between 500,000 and 750,000 people pulled over on the road and on overpasses, got out of their cars and watched the 300-car motorcade pass.
It took a little more than an hour for the cortege — including 19 motorcycle policemen, six police sedans, three team buses, limos and luxury cars — to travel 53 miles to the cemetery at Elmwood.
More than 10,000 quietly observed Bryant’s burial, including family, coaches, giants of football such as Joe Namath and state senators.
“I feel a great loss as I did back on the day when I was in high school, March 31, 1931, when the fellow came over the hill at the baseball diamond said, ‘Hey you guys, Knute Rockne’s dead,’ “ former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes said of Bryant at the time. “I felt the same loss then because Knute Rockne was the great coach of the era, no question about it, and this man is the great coach of this era. And to lose him and to lose his leadership is a great loss.”
It is written large numbers of mourners visited the grave for days.
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