Paterno again

I saw one comment on an article about Joe Paterno's death. Someone lamented that Paterno didn't retire when he was 77 like people wanted----he could have avoided all this unpleasantness.

Well. No. Paterno was 85 when he died. It was 2002 that Jerry Sandusky raped the little boy in the locker room, ten years ago. Meaning that Paterno was 75 when it happened.

By the time he was 77, Paterno had been cheerfully working with a man he knew to be a child molester for two years. And it's no good saying that he didn't really know whether it was true or not because he reported it to his "superior" at Penn State. Nothing was done about it, and that was apparently fine with Paterno. He knew Sandusky continued to work with children.

The public has known about this scandal for three months. Paterno knew about it for ten years.

Now people are talking about Paterno's "one moral failing" and whether it should overshadow all his work.

Well, he was head coach at Penn State for 45 years. For ten of those years, he knew that Sandusky was a child molester and he did nothing about it. His "one moral failing" continued for nearly a quarter of his time as head coach.