The Last Time JoePa Wasn’t Coaching …
On Oct. 29, 1949, Penn State’s football team beat Syracuse, 33-21.
It was the last home football game Penn State played without Joe Paterno as a member of the coaching staff. Until this weekend.
Paterno was playing quarterback and cornerback for Brown University that October. The following summer, he joined Rip Engle’s coaching staff in State College.
Here’s a snapshot of what the world looked like on that Saturday before Halloween in 1949:
- Harry S. Truman was the President of the United States.
- People were buzzing about the newest book from George Orwell, 1984.
- The Eagles, in the midst of an 11-1 season, were preparing to play the Steelers in Pittsburgh, a game they won 38-7. Led by Steve van Buren and rookie Chuck Bednarik,they won their second consecutive NFL title later that year.
- The Phillies had finished a distance third in the National League, a season most noted for the fact that first baseman Eddie Waitkus was shot by a female admirer in a Chicago hotel room, an event that became the inspiration for the book The Natural.
- Three weeks earlier, the Yankees had beaten the Dodgers in the World Series in five games.
- Philadelphia’s professional basketball team was the Warriors. Their star player was Jumpin’ Joe Fulks.
- Frankie Laine’s “That Lucky Old Sun” was the No. 1 song on the U.S. pop charts. Other stars on the charts that year include Doris Day, Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra.
- Yul Brenner, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin had just made their silver screen debuts.
- John Lennon was nine-years-old.
- Former Flyer coach Mike Keenan was eight-days-old.
- John F. Kennedy was in his second term as a relatively unknown congressman from Massachusetts.
- The big show on Broadway was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, starring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza.
- KDKA in Pittsburgh had become the first local, on-air television station.
- 1949 was the first year in American history that no African-Americans were reported lynched.
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