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STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Behind the metal fence that was erected around 5:30 on a Sunday morning in July 2012 and underneath the blue tarp layering the fence to block the view of onlookers, about a dozen construction workers from Penn State’s Office of Physical Plant (OPP) were tasked with the job of their lives: To hastily yet discreetly remove a 7-foot, 900-pound bronze statue of Joe Paterno, Penn State’s longtime football coach, from the east side of Beaver Stadium.
Nearly 30 police officers circled the workers, trying to keep onlookers at a distance. Yet every car that passed outside the football stadium and saw the makeshift work zone meant more fans and more reporters flocking to the scene, trying to sneak a final glimpse of the statue that was erected in 2001 and served as the backdrop of thousands of Penn State graduation photos and as a gathering place on football Saturdays.
Outfitted in neon-colored vests, white hardhats and work gloves, OPP workers used their arms to brace the statue for its dismantling. Sounds of power tools started at its base. One worker stood with his hands on his knees, looking as if he was part of a 2-minute drill in the football stadium 20 yards behind him. The forklift operator tilted his head, getting a final look. Paterno’s bronzed index finger still pointed skyward, even if the signature Coke-bottle glasses and rolled-up pant legs were now buried under layers of protection. Six months to the day of his death, on a sleepy Sunday morning in State College, Joe Paterno’s statue was gone.
The plaques behind the statue, those honoring Paterno’s teams, were pried from the stone wall. The wall would fall, too. The four bronze football player replicas behind Paterno, meant to look like they were running out of a tunnel behind the head coach, were removed. The lights in the ground that once illuminated the bronze statue had no use.
The words that once hung behind the statue and below the name Joseph Vincent Paterno?
Educator
Coach
Humanitarian
Gone, gone and gone.
In January 2012, fans gathered at the statue while wiping their eyes, lighting candles and leaving trinkets at its base as the 85-year-old former head coach, in a hospital bed just down the hill at Mount Nittany Medical Center, died from lung cancer complications. By that July, university president Rodney Erickson said the statue had become “a source of division and an obstacle to healing.” Erickson’s three-year tenure after stepping in for ousted president Graham Spanier is largely marked by his handling of that hunk of bronze.
The statue became a 7-foot lightning rod after the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal cost Paterno his job and brought forth questions from Penn State, the NCAA, media and fans about whether Paterno did or knew enough to act in the face of his former defensive coordinator’s crimes.
After a scandal that included everything from a fired university president once crouching in the bushes outside Old Main to avoid reporters to Paterno’s firing over the phone resulting in students and fans pouring into downtown streets, the statue removal went off without a hitch. It might have been Penn State’s most well-executed plan during that time.
Though the statue is gone, its spirit never entirely left. Signs pop up around town in front of local businesses reading “Return Paterno’s statue.” T-shirts with the statue plastered on a milk carton are sold at a downtown bar. Miniature statue replicas are still available for purchase online, some of them in restaurants and downtown stores. A banner plane even flew over The Horseshoe last season before Penn State’s game at Ohio State with a messaging reading, “Penn State: Why are you waiting…Honor Joe Paterno!!”
When asked via email for details about the statue’s location, a Penn State spokesman replied: “The Paterno statue is stored in a safe and secure location, which the University does not disclose.” It’s a line Penn State has recycled for years. It also means the statue wasn’t turned into a molten puddle. It is out there, somewhere, in Happy Valley or beyond, waiting to be found.
Some believe the statue was loaded into the back of a truck and taken out of the football stadium, transported to a secure location before sunrise. Others wonder if that was a rumor floated as misdirection. Go in search of the statue and you might end up in Sue Paterno’s garage and creepy storage lockers on the edge of town, or peering into windows of various campus buildings, chasing one theory after another. Unlike banners that can be taken down from rafters and easily boxed up to collect dust, a 7-foot statue isn’t easy to hide.
Miraculously, it’s stayed hidden this long.
“It’s one of those things that’s just become this giant mystery that’s taken on a life of its own – probably more so than it should,” said Jay Paterno, Joe’s son. “The mystery is what kind of keeps the thing going.”
The Joe Paterno statue was removed eight and a half months after his firing. (Abby Drey / Centre Daily Times via Getty Images)
Quickly, a primer on the prize:
On Nov. 2, 2001, less than a week after Joe Paterno secured career victory No. 324 — a milestone win that moved him past Paul “Bear” Bryant as the winningest FBS coach — sculptor Angelo DiMaria’s surprise creation was unveiled. Friends of Joe and Sue Paterno and the university commissioned the statue. DiMaria, an artist who emigrated from Sicily to Reading, Pa., in 1958, spent 2-3 months trying to get his 18-inch sculpture of Paterno just right. His concept was taken to a foundry in Ephrata, Pa., for enlargement. DiMaria knew that his work would become a State College landmark after attending just one Penn State football game — the first football game of his life — and hearing the crowd roar as he snapped pictures of Paterno from the sideline, images he’d use to design this statue.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way for a piece of work that DiMaria was once honored to construct. The statue was meant to be enjoyed by those who purposely sought it out or even those who used it as a meeting location before heading into the stadium on football Saturdays. When it was ripped from the concrete in 2012, it pained him to see something he created gone from the public eye.
But he also understood why it was done, and he understands why others might be curious what became of it. For the record, DiMaria doesn’t know its whereabouts.
“We don’t know where the statue is and nobody in State College wants to talk about it, of course,” he says. “Oh my God no.”
DiMaria once fell for a satirical story posted to a student-run website, Onward State, on April 1, 2015 — April Fools’ Day — claiming his statue was melted down. He says he won’t dismiss any rumor until he lays eyes on the statue again.
There’s one building on campus that carries Joe Paterno’s name: The library. Would the school have been cheeky and tucked the statue somewhere in the Paterno Library?
“There were people who called me that Sunday morning (when it was removed) thinking it was being put into the archives,” said Jackie Esposito, a special projects librarian at Penn State. But Penn State’s library and the all-sports museum located in Beaver Stadium do not have the statue.
There are more than 20 dwellings dedicated to storage on Penn State’s campus. Eliminate greenhouses, storage sheds that would be too small, diesel storage tanks and pesticide storage, and the list dwindles. But finding a good hiding space on a 7,958-acre campus would not be hard.
Behind the Blue Band’s practice field with a picturesque view of the football stadium off in the distance are storage facilities on both sides of the road. There’s even one building, Lion Surplus, that’s open to the public and sells extra or unwanted equipment — old desks, chairs, bikes and the like. There’s no chance the statue would’ve been sold there as an auction item, as even its momentary presence would have left a trail of social media posts. It would go for a pretty penny, though.
But it’s plausible it’s stuffed in one of the campus storage facilities, competing with oversized planters somewhere near the parked trailer plastered with the university emblem that reads “confined space rescue.” There’s plenty of room, but with so many workers zipping in and out along these roads, it’s too obvious of a spot and also too risky to keep it among so many people.
My suspicions were confirmed when I pulled out a printed campus map and one tipster, eager to help but quick to retract his name, pointed toward the general vicinity of where he last believed he’d been close to the statue. He pointed near the stadium.
The tipster said not to look for it in storage on campus, but rather in basements in on-campus buildings. It conjures images of the Paterno statue, cloaked in a sheet, tucked between a stack of old classroom desks and some broken overhead projectors.
“Check the meat lab,” the tipster said with a toothy grin as we sat across from one another in a parking lot. Suddenly feeling like Nicolas Cage in “National Treasure,” I followed this lead and zeroed in on the meat lab.
One problem: Because of the campus closure during the pandemic, the doors were locked. The meat lab is right across the street from the east side of Beaver Stadium, in front of the Centre County/Penn State Visitor Center. It has a loading area directly across from Beaver Stadium’s loading docks A and B, meaning it’s a straight shot across the street from the stadium’s dock to the lab. The location checked a lot of boxes.
I wondered how I could get a blueprint of the 16,000-square-foot building. I wondered if I could find a curious student who could help me understand the ins and outs of the building.
But as I researched more, the meat lab started to seem like the last place Penn State would hide the statue. The facility is open to the public for meat sales on Fridays during the fall and spring semesters. That’s a lot of peering eyes. Buried on the university’s website are two lines saying that the meat lab is home to three students who live and work in the facility. No way Penn State would stash the statue there knowing three people had around-the-clock access to the building.
But as one door closes, another opens. While I was dismayed about the meat lab, another tipster reached out and seemed to know what he was talking about. The statue was moved multiple times, he said, and now it is off campus.
A few years ago, there was a sighting. Or at least that’s what some people thought.
Sue Paterno was out front of her house near campus on McKee Street. She had her garage door propped open and a passerby took note of something in the back of the space. It was tall. It had a bronze hue. It had Joe Paterno’s face, the pointer finger extended, the same Coke-bottle glasses. Was Paterno’s widow keeping the statue in her garage?
“A buddy of mine was like, ‘Jay, there’s people all over the message boards saying that Sue has it and she’s just lying,’” Jay Paterno recalled. “They were saying she was going to do something with it or put it up somewhere. I’m like, what the hell?”
Jay raced to his mother’s home. Indeed, he found a large, bronze-colored statue of his father in Sue’s garage. As Jay walked toward it, he realized it was a cardboard replica of the statue spray-painted bronze. A fan set it up at tailgates that football season and gave it to Sue.
“I said, ‘Mom, would you get that thing out of here? From the street it looks like the statue!’” Jay said.
Sue laughed.
“I said, ‘Jay, No. 1, my garage isn’t big enough to put that thing in. The ceiling is too low.’ What’s the matter with people? And really, you’d need heavy equipment to move it. They couldn’t get that equipment in my garage. It’s only a regular concrete floor. It’s not gonna handle the statue.
“People make up all kinds of things, but I was like, I don’t need this. So I moved (the replica).”
Paterno statue sightings have taken many forms over the years. (Abby Drey / Centre Daily Times via Getty Images)
Sue has fond memories of the statue. Sue and Jay took a quick detour to view it the night Joe broke his left leg in 2006 during a sideline collision at Wisconsin. He began the night refusing medical treatment, staying in that same McKee Street home. By 4:30 a.m., the pain was too much to bear, so Sue and Jay drove Joe in Jay’s van to meet the team doctor.
They needed to show Joe something first.
“The students had put bandages on Joe on the statue,” Sue said with a chuckle. “They had wrapped the leg. Jay said, ‘Dad, we’re gonna stop so you can see this.’ We drove past the statue. Joe said, ‘Oh that’s funny.’”
The Paterno family reached a settlement with Penn State this past February regarding a number of issues. Details have not been disclosed. Jay Paterno watched as speculation about the statue’s whereabouts began again. To his knowledge, any recommendations about what to do with the statue were not part of the settlement.
“I don’t know where anything is, and really, I don’t think they’re about to tell us,” Sue Paterno said. She joked during a Penn State fundraising campaign that they should create a scavenger hunt for donors to try to find the statue. She added: “No one has consulted us. No one has said a word to us. We have no clue.”
The statue held a special meaning to the players Paterno coached in a 46-year career and the fans who adored him. Taking it down was viewed by some as trying to erase an entire era of Penn State football. The obsession over the whereabouts of the statue is a testament to the fact that it won’t fade, just like on Saturdays at Beaver Stadium when Paterno’s picture appears on the video board as part of pregame pump-up videos, and the crowd cheers.
“I was sitting next to four of five other trustees, alumni-elected trustees, and their phones and their Facebook messages and all that stuff immediately were like where’s the statue?” Jay Paterno said, recalling the settlement this past February. “It’s just one of those things.”
Some have wondered if a rich booster or Penn State diehard ended up with the statue. Maybe it is tucked away in some blue and white man cave, the prize of prizes for a Joe Paterno sycophant. To that possibility, Jay Paterno chuckled.
“If Franco (Harris) had it, you’d know it,” he said.
A person who sets foot in Beaver Stadium several times per month, who runs in circles with deep-pocketed Penn State boosters, assured me he knows what happened to the statue. He’s one of the select few who knows where it was taken, he said. When I told him about my meat lab adventures, he smiled from ear to ear. He wouldn’t tell me exactly where it was, he said, but he would help me stay on course.
That is how I ended up at a storage facility off of E. College Ave., past the Nittany Mall and located near the office of the local newspaper, The Centre Daily Times.
Tucked away next to a recycling center about five minutes away from Beaver Stadium was a barely visible sign for Penn Centre Logistics. I pulled through the open gate and passed a Mercedes party bus, painted white with a navy blue stripe down the middle copying the simplistic design of Penn State’s football helmet. There were three other cars in the parking lot, not counting the abandoned super-fan van.
Several storage bays were open and no trucks were being loaded. I found a spot to park, put on my mask — not even a pandemic could halt this search — and found an entrance. I opened the door, climbed a few stairs and found myself standing alone on the warehouse floor.
Rectangular boxes over 5-feet tall and made of wood were piled one on top of the other. The ceiling seemed to stretch to the sky. If the lights were on, they were dim at best. It was like the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
There was a large ceramic turtle about the size of an adult in the middle of the warehouse floor, dramatically upping the creepiness factor. A stack of blue moving blankets were folded in a corner. It looked like the one draped over the statue the day it was taken down (and, admittedly, like every moving blanket everywhere).
If Penn State wanted to keep the statue off campus, this storage facility seemed like a good choice. The statue could be packed away in one of the tall, rectangular boxes lined up one after the next.
I saw two workers, one of whom was sitting in a cart. I approached and explained why I was there, but before I could finish, both looked at the ground.
“You hiding the statue here?” the male worker said as he pointed to the woman on the cart.
“That’s all (Penn State) has here. Those two trailers over there,” she said, pointing in the area of a medium-sized white trailer too tiny to hold the statue. “That’s Penn State’s, but it’s not here.
“Ask Sue Paterno. I bet she knows,” she quipped.
I told them I’d already asked Sue. They laughed, and they were clearly laughing at me, the reporter who believed that the Paternos really don’t know where the statue is.
I asked more questions, but the female worker grew annoyed. The eagle on her American-themed face mask looked like it wanted to fly off the fabric and claw me. I thanked them and left.
Having crossed Penn Centre Logistics off my list, I drove a few miles, past the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, up a hill and behind a few rundown trailers. There were several storage units with light blue and white numbers making up Pleasant Gap Storage Center.
I walked around the units, sizing them up, and they looked small. They’d be great for moving and keeping extra belongings in, but likely not big enough for the bronze Paterno. This, clearly, was not the place.
As I got back into my car, crossing another facility off my list, a man weathered from years in the sun and gnawing on a toothpick approached and motioned for me to roll down my window.
“You looking for something?” he asked. “I’m the owner of these storage units.”
““You know, Joe Paterno had a statue, and in 2012 it was taken down and put somewhere,” I said. “I’m checking with storage facilities in the area and saw this one.”
“I don’t have it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Trust me. If it was here, I’d tell you.”
And then he laughed. A deep belly laugh full of mockery.
“What does it matter anyway?” he said. “Really?”
“Oh, if only you knew. It’s still a really big deal. Trust me. I’ll let you know if I find it.”
“No you won’t,” he said, laughing some more.
I drove even further away from campus and arrived at Pleasant Gap’s Parks Centre Carriers.
A couple laps around yet another storage facility showed these units were tall enough, and there was plenty of empty space inside. I stepped into the office, where I was greeted with a smile. The secretary said there was no Paterno statue here and never has been.
She took pity as I rattled off storage and warehouse names. It felt like time to throw in the towel, but that is the thing about treasure hunts: When you think you are done with the search, a new thread pops up begging to be pulled.
“Did you try Hoy Transfer?” the secretary asked.
Still not fluent in the local storage unit/warehouse/moving scene, I shook my head.
“They move all the equipment for the football team. Maybe they know?” she said.
Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I headed back past the correctional facility and toward State College, almost back to where I started.
It’s a 90-degree afternoon with high humidity, the perfect tease that summer is around the corner. As the sun beats on large storage units and Mount Nittany sits off in the distance looking more green and vibrant than usual, perhaps the hiding place of the statue is close.
Backing into a parking spot out front of a storage facility, a man in a cut-off sweatshirt with arms full of tattoos sits on his motorcycle. He’s taking a vape break on this beautiful afternoon, unbothered by those heading in and out of the building wrapping up the work day around him, making small talk with his co-workers and the reporter who stumbles past.
This is Kevin Briscoe, president of Hoy Transfer, which is an agent for Atlas Van Lines. Briscoe is one of five equipment drivers for Penn State football. Fans might recognize him as the man in the cowboy hat on the sideline at games. He also has 10 season tickets.
Hoy Transfer has hauled items for Penn State since the 1800s, allegedly beginning with horse and buggies and coal transportation, and now handles football equipment and helping professors relocate. Since 1984, Briscoe has been among those hauling football equipment, driving the truck all over the country to ensure everything that’s on the sideline, down to helmets and shoulder pads, makes it to away games. Penn State brought in Hoy to clean out Paterno’s office in the football building after his firing.
If Penn State was going to take the statue to a safe location off campus, it would have made sense to do it with a company it has had a relationship with for important moves over the years.
The blue and white Penn State football equipment truck, complete with black fangs added to the front of the 18-wheeler, was parked nearby, a large reminder of his ties to the athletic department. As he vaped, I asked Briscoe if these storage units — big enough to fit a statue — belonged to Hoy. They did.
“Did you ever move the statue or is it here?” I asked.
“You’re only the second person to ask me in about eight years,” Briscoe said. (The other was his niece.) “I’m impressed.”
“I’m not aware that I ever moved it though,” he said.
He’s not aware because he said one can never be sure what’s stuffed in boxes when items are moved. But if it was unloaded and kept here, Briscoe said he’s positive he’d know it. He hasn’t seen it, he says.
Amid my searching of storage facilities, I filed a public records request regarding the whereabouts of the statue. In many other states, that request could have led to the invoices that paid the storage costs. But Pennsylvania’s restrictive record laws meant my request was swiftly denied by the school.
If the major storage facilities in the area claim they don’t have it, all signs point back to the statue being somewhere on Penn State’s sprawling campus.
After I’d exhausted all other statue search options, I fired off one more email to the university asking for at least an acknowledgment that the statue was still in State College. The email rejection from Penn State included the line:
“Nice try.”
There’s no trace of the Paterno statue outside Beaver Stadium anymore .. for the most part. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Recently, I drove past Beaver Stadium, past the site where the Paterno statue once stood. There is no indication of what was once there. One week after the statue was removed, a row of trees was planted in the space, making the area blend in with the rest of its surroundings. The first few years after the statue was removed, flowers, signs and handwritten notes to Joe Paterno were placed in the grassy area beneath those trees.
But as the years passed, as the trees grew, the tributes stopped. Today, it looks and feels like a fresh space, untethered to the past.
As I sat there trying to piece together how a statue could stay missing this long, I was reminded of something Sue Paterno said: Joe Paterno never really loved that statue. It was too much. Too big. Too grand. The pointed index finger made it look like Paterno was boasting, proclaiming to be No. 1. Many in the Penn State community obsess over the whereabouts of that statue while perhaps forgetting that Joe Paterno never wanted to be immortalized in that way.
“He always said, ‘Why’d they do a statue? Why would they want a statue?’”
Tipline: If you have any information on the location of the Joe Paterno statue, drop us a line at StatueSearch@gmail.com.
(Top photo: Chris Gardner / Getty Images)
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STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Behind the metal fence that was erected around 5:30 on a Sunday morning in July 2012 and underneath the blue tarp layering the fence to block the view of onlookers, about a dozen construction workers from Penn State’s Office of Physical Plant (OPP) were tasked with the job of their lives: To hastily yet discreetly remove a 7-foot, 900-pound bronze statue of Joe Paterno, Penn State’s longtime football coach, from the east side of Beaver Stadium.
Nearly 30 police officers circled the workers, trying to keep onlookers at a distance. Yet every car that passed outside the football stadium and saw the makeshift work zone meant more fans and more reporters flocking to the scene, trying to sneak a final glimpse of the statue that was erected in 2001 and served as the backdrop of thousands of Penn State graduation photos and as a gathering place on football Saturdays.
Outfitted in neon-colored vests, white hardhats and work gloves, OPP workers used their arms to brace the statue for its dismantling. Sounds of power tools started at its base. One worker stood with his hands on his knees, looking as if he was part of a 2-minute drill in the football stadium 20 yards behind him. The forklift operator tilted his head, getting a final look. Paterno’s bronzed index finger still pointed skyward, even if the signature Coke-bottle glasses and rolled-up pant legs were now buried under layers of protection. Six months to the day of his death, on a sleepy Sunday morning in State College, Joe Paterno’s statue was gone.
The plaques behind the statue, those honoring Paterno’s teams, were pried from the stone wall. The wall would fall, too. The four bronze football player replicas behind Paterno, meant to look like they were running out of a tunnel behind the head coach, were removed. The lights in the ground that once illuminated the bronze statue had no use.
The words that once hung behind the statue and below the name Joseph Vincent Paterno?
Educator
Coach
Humanitarian
Gone, gone and gone.
In January 2012, fans gathered at the statue while wiping their eyes, lighting candles and leaving trinkets at its base as the 85-year-old former head coach, in a hospital bed just down the hill at Mount Nittany Medical Center, died from lung cancer complications. By that July, university president Rodney Erickson said the statue had become “a source of division and an obstacle to healing.” Erickson’s three-year tenure after stepping in for ousted president Graham Spanier is largely marked by his handling of that hunk of bronze.
The statue became a 7-foot lightning rod after the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal cost Paterno his job and brought forth questions from Penn State, the NCAA, media and fans about whether Paterno did or knew enough to act in the face of his former defensive coordinator’s crimes.
After a scandal that included everything from a fired university president once crouching in the bushes outside Old Main to avoid reporters to Paterno’s firing over the phone resulting in students and fans pouring into downtown streets, the statue removal went off without a hitch. It might have been Penn State’s most well-executed plan during that time.
Though the statue is gone, its spirit never entirely left. Signs pop up around town in front of local businesses reading “Return Paterno’s statue.” T-shirts with the statue plastered on a milk carton are sold at a downtown bar. Miniature statue replicas are still available for purchase online, some of them in restaurants and downtown stores. A banner plane even flew over The Horseshoe last season before Penn State’s game at Ohio State with a messaging reading, “Penn State: Why are you waiting…Honor Joe Paterno!!”
When asked via email for details about the statue’s location, a Penn State spokesman replied: “The Paterno statue is stored in a safe and secure location, which the University does not disclose.” It’s a line Penn State has recycled for years. It also means the statue wasn’t turned into a molten puddle. It is out there, somewhere, in Happy Valley or beyond, waiting to be found.
Some believe the statue was loaded into the back of a truck and taken out of the football stadium, transported to a secure location before sunrise. Others wonder if that was a rumor floated as misdirection. Go in search of the statue and you might end up in Sue Paterno’s garage and creepy storage lockers on the edge of town, or peering into windows of various campus buildings, chasing one theory after another. Unlike banners that can be taken down from rafters and easily boxed up to collect dust, a 7-foot statue isn’t easy to hide.
Miraculously, it’s stayed hidden this long.
“It’s one of those things that’s just become this giant mystery that’s taken on a life of its own – probably more so than it should,” said Jay Paterno, Joe’s son. “The mystery is what kind of keeps the thing going.”
The Joe Paterno statue was removed eight and a half months after his firing. (Abby Drey / Centre Daily Times via Getty Images)
Quickly, a primer on the prize:
On Nov. 2, 2001, less than a week after Joe Paterno secured career victory No. 324 — a milestone win that moved him past Paul “Bear” Bryant as the winningest FBS coach — sculptor Angelo DiMaria’s surprise creation was unveiled. Friends of Joe and Sue Paterno and the university commissioned the statue. DiMaria, an artist who emigrated from Sicily to Reading, Pa., in 1958, spent 2-3 months trying to get his 18-inch sculpture of Paterno just right. His concept was taken to a foundry in Ephrata, Pa., for enlargement. DiMaria knew that his work would become a State College landmark after attending just one Penn State football game — the first football game of his life — and hearing the crowd roar as he snapped pictures of Paterno from the sideline, images he’d use to design this statue.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way for a piece of work that DiMaria was once honored to construct. The statue was meant to be enjoyed by those who purposely sought it out or even those who used it as a meeting location before heading into the stadium on football Saturdays. When it was ripped from the concrete in 2012, it pained him to see something he created gone from the public eye.
But he also understood why it was done, and he understands why others might be curious what became of it. For the record, DiMaria doesn’t know its whereabouts.
“We don’t know where the statue is and nobody in State College wants to talk about it, of course,” he says. “Oh my God no.”
DiMaria once fell for a satirical story posted to a student-run website, Onward State, on April 1, 2015 — April Fools’ Day — claiming his statue was melted down. He says he won’t dismiss any rumor until he lays eyes on the statue again.
There’s one building on campus that carries Joe Paterno’s name: The library. Would the school have been cheeky and tucked the statue somewhere in the Paterno Library?
“There were people who called me that Sunday morning (when it was removed) thinking it was being put into the archives,” said Jackie Esposito, a special projects librarian at Penn State. But Penn State’s library and the all-sports museum located in Beaver Stadium do not have the statue.
There are more than 20 dwellings dedicated to storage on Penn State’s campus. Eliminate greenhouses, storage sheds that would be too small, diesel storage tanks and pesticide storage, and the list dwindles. But finding a good hiding space on a 7,958-acre campus would not be hard.
Behind the Blue Band’s practice field with a picturesque view of the football stadium off in the distance are storage facilities on both sides of the road. There’s even one building, Lion Surplus, that’s open to the public and sells extra or unwanted equipment — old desks, chairs, bikes and the like. There’s no chance the statue would’ve been sold there as an auction item, as even its momentary presence would have left a trail of social media posts. It would go for a pretty penny, though.
But it’s plausible it’s stuffed in one of the campus storage facilities, competing with oversized planters somewhere near the parked trailer plastered with the university emblem that reads “confined space rescue.” There’s plenty of room, but with so many workers zipping in and out along these roads, it’s too obvious of a spot and also too risky to keep it among so many people.
My suspicions were confirmed when I pulled out a printed campus map and one tipster, eager to help but quick to retract his name, pointed toward the general vicinity of where he last believed he’d been close to the statue. He pointed near the stadium.
The tipster said not to look for it in storage on campus, but rather in basements in on-campus buildings. It conjures images of the Paterno statue, cloaked in a sheet, tucked between a stack of old classroom desks and some broken overhead projectors.
“Check the meat lab,” the tipster said with a toothy grin as we sat across from one another in a parking lot. Suddenly feeling like Nicolas Cage in “National Treasure,” I followed this lead and zeroed in on the meat lab.
One problem: Because of the campus closure during the pandemic, the doors were locked. The meat lab is right across the street from the east side of Beaver Stadium, in front of the Centre County/Penn State Visitor Center. It has a loading area directly across from Beaver Stadium’s loading docks A and B, meaning it’s a straight shot across the street from the stadium’s dock to the lab. The location checked a lot of boxes.
I wondered how I could get a blueprint of the 16,000-square-foot building. I wondered if I could find a curious student who could help me understand the ins and outs of the building.
But as I researched more, the meat lab started to seem like the last place Penn State would hide the statue. The facility is open to the public for meat sales on Fridays during the fall and spring semesters. That’s a lot of peering eyes. Buried on the university’s website are two lines saying that the meat lab is home to three students who live and work in the facility. No way Penn State would stash the statue there knowing three people had around-the-clock access to the building.
But as one door closes, another opens. While I was dismayed about the meat lab, another tipster reached out and seemed to know what he was talking about. The statue was moved multiple times, he said, and now it is off campus.
A few years ago, there was a sighting. Or at least that’s what some people thought.
Sue Paterno was out front of her house near campus on McKee Street. She had her garage door propped open and a passerby took note of something in the back of the space. It was tall. It had a bronze hue. It had Joe Paterno’s face, the pointer finger extended, the same Coke-bottle glasses. Was Paterno’s widow keeping the statue in her garage?
“A buddy of mine was like, ‘Jay, there’s people all over the message boards saying that Sue has it and she’s just lying,’” Jay Paterno recalled. “They were saying she was going to do something with it or put it up somewhere. I’m like, what the hell?”
Jay raced to his mother’s home. Indeed, he found a large, bronze-colored statue of his father in Sue’s garage. As Jay walked toward it, he realized it was a cardboard replica of the statue spray-painted bronze. A fan set it up at tailgates that football season and gave it to Sue.
“I said, ‘Mom, would you get that thing out of here? From the street it looks like the statue!’” Jay said.
Sue laughed.
“I said, ‘Jay, No. 1, my garage isn’t big enough to put that thing in. The ceiling is too low.’ What’s the matter with people? And really, you’d need heavy equipment to move it. They couldn’t get that equipment in my garage. It’s only a regular concrete floor. It’s not gonna handle the statue.
“People make up all kinds of things, but I was like, I don’t need this. So I moved (the replica).”
Paterno statue sightings have taken many forms over the years. (Abby Drey / Centre Daily Times via Getty Images)
Sue has fond memories of the statue. Sue and Jay took a quick detour to view it the night Joe broke his left leg in 2006 during a sideline collision at Wisconsin. He began the night refusing medical treatment, staying in that same McKee Street home. By 4:30 a.m., the pain was too much to bear, so Sue and Jay drove Joe in Jay’s van to meet the team doctor.
They needed to show Joe something first.
“The students had put bandages on Joe on the statue,” Sue said with a chuckle. “They had wrapped the leg. Jay said, ‘Dad, we’re gonna stop so you can see this.’ We drove past the statue. Joe said, ‘Oh that’s funny.’”
The Paterno family reached a settlement with Penn State this past February regarding a number of issues. Details have not been disclosed. Jay Paterno watched as speculation about the statue’s whereabouts began again. To his knowledge, any recommendations about what to do with the statue were not part of the settlement.
“I don’t know where anything is, and really, I don’t think they’re about to tell us,” Sue Paterno said. She joked during a Penn State fundraising campaign that they should create a scavenger hunt for donors to try to find the statue. She added: “No one has consulted us. No one has said a word to us. We have no clue.”
The statue held a special meaning to the players Paterno coached in a 46-year career and the fans who adored him. Taking it down was viewed by some as trying to erase an entire era of Penn State football. The obsession over the whereabouts of the statue is a testament to the fact that it won’t fade, just like on Saturdays at Beaver Stadium when Paterno’s picture appears on the video board as part of pregame pump-up videos, and the crowd cheers.
“I was sitting next to four of five other trustees, alumni-elected trustees, and their phones and their Facebook messages and all that stuff immediately were like where’s the statue?” Jay Paterno said, recalling the settlement this past February. “It’s just one of those things.”
Some have wondered if a rich booster or Penn State diehard ended up with the statue. Maybe it is tucked away in some blue and white man cave, the prize of prizes for a Joe Paterno sycophant. To that possibility, Jay Paterno chuckled.
“If Franco (Harris) had it, you’d know it,” he said.
A person who sets foot in Beaver Stadium several times per month, who runs in circles with deep-pocketed Penn State boosters, assured me he knows what happened to the statue. He’s one of the select few who knows where it was taken, he said. When I told him about my meat lab adventures, he smiled from ear to ear. He wouldn’t tell me exactly where it was, he said, but he would help me stay on course.
That is how I ended up at a storage facility off of E. College Ave., past the Nittany Mall and located near the office of the local newspaper, The Centre Daily Times.
Tucked away next to a recycling center about five minutes away from Beaver Stadium was a barely visible sign for Penn Centre Logistics. I pulled through the open gate and passed a Mercedes party bus, painted white with a navy blue stripe down the middle copying the simplistic design of Penn State’s football helmet. There were three other cars in the parking lot, not counting the abandoned super-fan van.
Several storage bays were open and no trucks were being loaded. I found a spot to park, put on my mask — not even a pandemic could halt this search — and found an entrance. I opened the door, climbed a few stairs and found myself standing alone on the warehouse floor.
Rectangular boxes over 5-feet tall and made of wood were piled one on top of the other. The ceiling seemed to stretch to the sky. If the lights were on, they were dim at best. It was like the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
There was a large ceramic turtle about the size of an adult in the middle of the warehouse floor, dramatically upping the creepiness factor. A stack of blue moving blankets were folded in a corner. It looked like the one draped over the statue the day it was taken down (and, admittedly, like every moving blanket everywhere).
If Penn State wanted to keep the statue off campus, this storage facility seemed like a good choice. The statue could be packed away in one of the tall, rectangular boxes lined up one after the next.
I saw two workers, one of whom was sitting in a cart. I approached and explained why I was there, but before I could finish, both looked at the ground.
“You hiding the statue here?” the male worker said as he pointed to the woman on the cart.
“That’s all (Penn State) has here. Those two trailers over there,” she said, pointing in the area of a medium-sized white trailer too tiny to hold the statue. “That’s Penn State’s, but it’s not here.
“Ask Sue Paterno. I bet she knows,” she quipped.
I told them I’d already asked Sue. They laughed, and they were clearly laughing at me, the reporter who believed that the Paternos really don’t know where the statue is.
I asked more questions, but the female worker grew annoyed. The eagle on her American-themed face mask looked like it wanted to fly off the fabric and claw me. I thanked them and left.
Having crossed Penn Centre Logistics off my list, I drove a few miles, past the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, up a hill and behind a few rundown trailers. There were several storage units with light blue and white numbers making up Pleasant Gap Storage Center.
I walked around the units, sizing them up, and they looked small. They’d be great for moving and keeping extra belongings in, but likely not big enough for the bronze Paterno. This, clearly, was not the place.
As I got back into my car, crossing another facility off my list, a man weathered from years in the sun and gnawing on a toothpick approached and motioned for me to roll down my window.
“You looking for something?” he asked. “I’m the owner of these storage units.”
““You know, Joe Paterno had a statue, and in 2012 it was taken down and put somewhere,” I said. “I’m checking with storage facilities in the area and saw this one.”
“I don’t have it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Trust me. If it was here, I’d tell you.”
And then he laughed. A deep belly laugh full of mockery.
“What does it matter anyway?” he said. “Really?”
“Oh, if only you knew. It’s still a really big deal. Trust me. I’ll let you know if I find it.”
“No you won’t,” he said, laughing some more.
I drove even further away from campus and arrived at Pleasant Gap’s Parks Centre Carriers.
A couple laps around yet another storage facility showed these units were tall enough, and there was plenty of empty space inside. I stepped into the office, where I was greeted with a smile. The secretary said there was no Paterno statue here and never has been.
She took pity as I rattled off storage and warehouse names. It felt like time to throw in the towel, but that is the thing about treasure hunts: When you think you are done with the search, a new thread pops up begging to be pulled.
“Did you try Hoy Transfer?” the secretary asked.
Still not fluent in the local storage unit/warehouse/moving scene, I shook my head.
“They move all the equipment for the football team. Maybe they know?” she said.
Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that?
I headed back past the correctional facility and toward State College, almost back to where I started.
It’s a 90-degree afternoon with high humidity, the perfect tease that summer is around the corner. As the sun beats on large storage units and Mount Nittany sits off in the distance looking more green and vibrant than usual, perhaps the hiding place of the statue is close.
Backing into a parking spot out front of a storage facility, a man in a cut-off sweatshirt with arms full of tattoos sits on his motorcycle. He’s taking a vape break on this beautiful afternoon, unbothered by those heading in and out of the building wrapping up the work day around him, making small talk with his co-workers and the reporter who stumbles past.
This is Kevin Briscoe, president of Hoy Transfer, which is an agent for Atlas Van Lines. Briscoe is one of five equipment drivers for Penn State football. Fans might recognize him as the man in the cowboy hat on the sideline at games. He also has 10 season tickets.
Hoy Transfer has hauled items for Penn State since the 1800s, allegedly beginning with horse and buggies and coal transportation, and now handles football equipment and helping professors relocate. Since 1984, Briscoe has been among those hauling football equipment, driving the truck all over the country to ensure everything that’s on the sideline, down to helmets and shoulder pads, makes it to away games. Penn State brought in Hoy to clean out Paterno’s office in the football building after his firing.
If Penn State was going to take the statue to a safe location off campus, it would have made sense to do it with a company it has had a relationship with for important moves over the years.
The blue and white Penn State football equipment truck, complete with black fangs added to the front of the 18-wheeler, was parked nearby, a large reminder of his ties to the athletic department. As he vaped, I asked Briscoe if these storage units — big enough to fit a statue — belonged to Hoy. They did.
“Did you ever move the statue or is it here?” I asked.
“You’re only the second person to ask me in about eight years,” Briscoe said. (The other was his niece.) “I’m impressed.”
“I’m not aware that I ever moved it though,” he said.
He’s not aware because he said one can never be sure what’s stuffed in boxes when items are moved. But if it was unloaded and kept here, Briscoe said he’s positive he’d know it. He hasn’t seen it, he says.
Amid my searching of storage facilities, I filed a public records request regarding the whereabouts of the statue. In many other states, that request could have led to the invoices that paid the storage costs. But Pennsylvania’s restrictive record laws meant my request was swiftly denied by the school.
If the major storage facilities in the area claim they don’t have it, all signs point back to the statue being somewhere on Penn State’s sprawling campus.
After I’d exhausted all other statue search options, I fired off one more email to the university asking for at least an acknowledgment that the statue was still in State College. The email rejection from Penn State included the line:
“Nice try.”
There’s no trace of the Paterno statue outside Beaver Stadium anymore .. for the most part. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Recently, I drove past Beaver Stadium, past the site where the Paterno statue once stood. There is no indication of what was once there. One week after the statue was removed, a row of trees was planted in the space, making the area blend in with the rest of its surroundings. The first few years after the statue was removed, flowers, signs and handwritten notes to Joe Paterno were placed in the grassy area beneath those trees.
But as the years passed, as the trees grew, the tributes stopped. Today, it looks and feels like a fresh space, untethered to the past.
As I sat there trying to piece together how a statue could stay missing this long, I was reminded of something Sue Paterno said: Joe Paterno never really loved that statue. It was too much. Too big. Too grand. The pointed index finger made it look like Paterno was boasting, proclaiming to be No. 1. Many in the Penn State community obsess over the whereabouts of that statue while perhaps forgetting that Joe Paterno never wanted to be immortalized in that way.
“He always said, ‘Why’d they do a statue? Why would they want a statue?’”
Tipline: If you have any information on the location of the Joe Paterno statue, drop us a line at StatueSearch@gmail.com.
(Top photo: Chris Gardner / Getty Images)
