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oe Paterno was still playing smash- mouth street football in Brooklyn when the roots of the State College Quarterback Club were planted, but he is the man who made Penn State's o:cial football booster group the thriving organization it is today. Little is known about the early days of the group that now holds a weekly lunch- eon for its 750 members, sponsors the team's annual awards banquet and donates thousands of dollars for academic support. Although the Quarterback Club o:cially organized in 1941, it actually began in the late '30s. A search through Penn State's o:cial athletic 8les, the Paterno-Pattee Library's sports archives, the digital archives of The Daily Collegian and other sources reveals very little about the history of the club. Perhaps the details are buried somewhere in the archive 8les. However, two books written by men who were major person- alities in the history of Penn State athletics, Ridge Riley and Mickey Bergstein, are help- ful in determining how it all began. Riley was connected with Penn State in one way or another from his undergraduate years (1928-32) until his death in January 1976. He was the executive director of the Alumni Association from 1947-70 and in 1938 created a weekly newsletter to alumni during the football season that still exists today as The Football Letter. Bergstein also graduated from Penn State (1943) and for 25 years taught marketing on campus. But he was best known as a broadcaster. Bergstein, who died in 2012, not only was the manager of the State College radio station that dominated the market in the 1950s and '60s but also cov- ered Penn State athletics from the postwar years into the '70s, including various roles on the football team's radio network. Bergstein's 1998 autobiography, "Penn State Sports Stories and More," o9ers the earliest reference this writer found to the State College Quarterback Club. In the 8rst sentence of chapter four, he cites 1928 as the start of the club, writing: "In the late 1920s, a group of State Col- lege businessmen decided to ask Bob Hig- gins, the head coach at the time, to come to a luncheon or send one of his assistants, and o9er comments about the game, along with 8lms of the previous games. There was no television at the time and this provided a rare opportunity to see all the games, both home and away, along with appropriate expert comments and obser- vations. Coach Higgins agreed and the State College Quarterback Club was born." Bergstein had the right concept but the wrong decade. Perhaps it was a typograph- ical error in his manuscript that was not corrected in the printed book. Or maybe it was just his memory, because many others interviewed about the club's history could not be speci8c about dates, either. Higgins didn't become head coach until 1930, and the 8rst game to be recorded on 8lm was a 19-12 loss at Penn on Nov. 14, 1936. Higgins had asked some students to 8lm that game so that he and his sta9 could analyze it later. When he viewed the 8lm and saw that the students had missed Harry Harrison's 94-yard kicko9 return for a Penn State touchdown, he went looking for an adult to handle the assignment. And that's how an amiable physical education professor and former Olympic middle-dis- tance runner named Ray Conger became a frequent guest at the Quarterback Club gatherings. He was the chief cameraman for the game 8lms from 1937 until 1977. Riley has only a succinct reference to that early period in his book "Road to Number One," which John Black helped complete so that the book could be pub- lished in 1977. Riley wrote that before 1941, the weekly gatherings were known informally as the "Monday Morning Quar- terbacks." Nowadays, that phrase, written in lower case, is in the dictionary with several de8nitions, such as "one who crit- icizes or passes judgment from a position of hindsight;" "a person who unfairly criticizes or questions the decisions and actions of other people a;er something has happened;" and "one who second- guesses." Perhaps those negative de8ni- tions are why the group's name was o:- cially changed to the State College Quar- terback Club. As Riley wrote, "The strong 8nish of the 1941 varsity and the exciting unde- feated freshman squad loaded with po- tential stars stimulated local interest. Ready to promote practical support for the spontaneous enthusiasm were Assis- tant Coaches [Earle] Edwards and [Al] Michaels, the crusading Casey Jones, and a number of State College citizens spear- J Supporting cast Quarterback Club has played key role in PSU's success | HISTORY

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