The Joe Paterno I knew best was still a relatively young man in his 30s or 40s, 20 years before he became the Penn State and college football icon we know today.

I was reporting part-time about Penn State football, and Joe was making the transition from a loyal assistant and offensive guru under Rip Engle to head coach, reconstructing the team with his own philosophy and innovations.

Beginning in the early 1960s, it became apparent that Paterno would eventually succeed his mentor, and just about all of the older and more experienced assistants under Engle were for it. It may be difficult to believe these days, but the coaching staffs in the 1950s and 1960s were truly like a family. They were not only with each other in meetings and on the field, but they socialized together after hours, too.

One of my favorite photographs in the Penn State All-Sports Museum is near the exit of the first-floor exhibits. It goes back to a late winter afternoon of the 1950s outside the Allenberry Playhouse near Harrisburg. All the coaches and their wives were there except J.T. White and his wife, who were late when the photo had to be taken in the fading sunlight.

On the far left is young Joe Paterno, still a bachelor. This was one of Joe's favorite photos, too, as it was one of only a few on the wall in his expansive Lasch Building office.

A visit to Allenberry was an annual affair for the coaches, and in 1959 Engle also started a weekly tradition of gathering the coaches and their wives for cocktails and dinner after the final practice on the Thursday before a game.

A different coach would host the cocktails at his house, and then they would go to dinner, almost always at the Tavern Restaurant. One time before he married, Joe held the cocktail party at his place, a small bedroom in the home of assistant coach Jim O'Hora. Joe lived there for many years.

"We squeezed 15 people into the bedroom for a one-hour cocktail party,'' Penn State's first linebacker coach Dan Radakovich told me recently. "That was truly a unique experience."

As head coach, Joe continued that Thursday night tradition into the 1970s, but as the coaching staff changed and his longtime assistants retired, those weekly dinners ended. That probably marked the end of an era in Joe's career, too, for it was about that time that the candid, hotshot football coach was becoming a major national figure.

I first met Joe in that "family" stage in 1955 when I was a freshman writing for the Daily Collegian. All of the assistants were friendly with the Collegian kids, and Joe was one of the most popular.

As I write about it now, I think we were almost part of the family. The newspaper and the college were much smaller then, and the goal of the sportswriters was to become the sports editor as a senior and cover the football team.

Sometimes we even traveled with the team on longer road trips, and for a while some sports editors even received a letterman's jacket at the end of the season. It's not that we didn't give critical opinions when we saw something we didn't like, but we did it in a more benign way. It was a different, less contentious style of journalism that thrived for decades but has long since evolved into the adversarial, instantaneous, 24-hour, Twitter, ESPN maelstrom of today.

Two years after graduation and a stint in the Navy, I went to work for The Associated Press in Pittsburgh. There, I began seeing Joe again at a weekly Tuesday college football media luncheon during the season. Penn State, Pitt and West Virginia would send their sports information directors and the head coach or an assistant, and sometimes that was Joe. He was still the same Joe, greeting me with that smile on his face and a sharp wisecrack of years past.

Over the next five years, I wrote many stories about Penn State football, first for the AP and then as a freelancer for a new newspaper called Pittsburgh Weekly Sports, co-founded by Beano Cook, then Pitt's sports information director.

On Thursday, Feb. 17, 1966, Pittsburgh sportscaster Tom Bender, the play-by-play man for the football radio network, broke the story on KDKA-TV's 11 o'clock newscast that Rip Engle would retire the next day and Joe Paterno would probably succeed him.

During a news conference the following Saturday, Joe was named head coach.

At that time I was working in Harrisburg, but in late August I was back in Pittsburgh working in the newsroom of WIIC-TV. A few days after returning, Bender asked me if I would be his new spotter on Penn State broadcasts. We had known each other since my AP days, and he had learned of my spotting experience as an undergraduate.

On Sept. 17, 1966, I walked into the small booth at Beaver Stadium and met a co-analyst who also had just been hired, a Lewistown sportscaster named Fran Fisher. I certainly didn't envision that Fran would one day be a close friend. Nor did either of us know that Fran would soon become part of Joe's three-man team, along with Penn State's sports information director Jim Tarman, that would change Penn State football forever with their marketing innovations.

Before the 1967 season, I convinced my boss that our television station should concentrate on covering Penn State games since our rivals in Pittsburgh were heavily invested in Pitt.

That began a three-year odyssey that added television reporting about Penn State football to my spotting along with freelance writing. But what I did for television then was the dark ages compared to the omnipotent massive media coverage of today.

On game days, my cameraman would film the game, and then we would interview Joe and players on the field and in the locker room near where the Lasch Building is today. We'd do enough interviews to carry us through the week. We'd drive the film back to Pittsburgh and process it, usually in time to use some video on the 11 o'clock news. Before the season, we'd go up to State College a couple times and interview Joe and the players and use that material over a few days.

All through this period, Joe never changed. Wisecracking and teasing. Up front and honest. Still treating me like an old friend, but no longer like a student. Truly like equals. Almost still part of the family.

The last game I covered was at Pitt in 1969. We looked a lot alike back then, and I was often mistaken for his brother. So, after my postgame interview, I asked him to pretend he was me doing the interview and I was him. He did, and it was a blast. We used it on the air that night and people couldn't believe it.

After that, I moved to the Midwest, and for the next few years I covered four Penn State bowl games as a freelancer. But after 1976 I simply was a fan, mostly via television because I saw only one home game from 1970 until 1983. I'd see Joe occasionally on the road or trade letters with him, and he was always the same.

I think our relationship can best be summed up by the autograph he left for me in his autobiography, "Paterno by the Book." I had helped arrange for Joe to participate in a major National Press Club sports forum featuring Howard Cosell as moderator in the spring of 1990. Joe was flying in from Detroit after a testimonial dinner for Michigan's Bo Schembechler. He was early and said we should get a cup of coffee at the airport before going to the Press Club.

We sat there for more than half an hour talking about a lot of things. Joe told me about the Schembechler dinner, brought me up to date about the team and asked about my family as we reminisced about the old days. No one recognized him, which is hard to imagine today.

Just before we left the coffee shop, Joe signed the book. Truly, a few tears are coming to my eyes as I type this. Here's what he wrote: "To Lou, I hope this brings back some memories - We were young once. Fondly, Joe Paterno."

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