Former State High and Penn State Great Remembered
Author: Mark Brennan
The blurb about the award is on page 169 of 212 in the
2007 Penn State Football Yearbook, along with a host of
other trophies that are presented to Nittany Lion players each
year. “Maginnis Award,” it says in small type, and it is followed
by two short sentences explaining that the honor annually
goes to the team’s outstanding offensive lineman in the
memory of former PSU guard Richard L. Maginnis Jr.
In the sense that they are meant to honor people who
have passed away, browsing the team’s annual awards is a bit
like visiting a cemetery and pausing to read gravestones. You
see the names, and it occurs to you that each one represents
a story. Some of the stories are sad and some of them are
uplifting. Some of them are well-known and some of them all
but forgotten. Some of them have had a wide-ranging impact
and some of them hit closer to home.
As for Richard “Dick” Maginnis, who is buried in Centre
County Memorial Park, not far from the Penn State campus, his
story includes all of the above, contradictory though it may
sound. To the typical Penn State fan, he is a virtual unknown.
Ask someone about the great Nittany Lion offensive linemen
of the early 1980s, and they’ll rip off names like Sean Farrell,
Mike Munchak and Ron Heller.
But if you talk to his former teammates and coaches,
they’ll quickly remember Maginnis as a starting guard on
the 1982 national championship team and an athlete who but
for injuries would have continued on to the NFL. They also
paint Maginnis as the consummate team player, someone so
focused on winning he ignored pain.
And if you talk to Maginnis’ family, you’re going to get
… well … an earful. And that’s not because any of them
are particularly loquacious, but rather because he has six
surviving siblings (as well as his mother) who remain close
despite living through a pair of tragedies earlier in their lives.
This is the story behind the award. This is the story
behind the gravestone. This is the story of Dick Maginnis.
• Ron Heller was a 6-foot-6, 280-pound starting offensive
tackle for the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles. And on this particular
summer night in 1989, the behemoth of a man found himself
driving north on New Jersey’s Atlantic City Expressway. He
was in a pickup truck. He was crying.
Earlier in the evening, he had made the hour-long
drive from Philly to Atlantic City, intent on confronting
his friend, Dick Maginnis. Maginnis and his fiancé,
Yolanda Zook, were spending the weekend at a hotel in
the resort town, trying to figure out the rest of his life
— or what was left of it.
Stricken with a re-occurrence of cancer, Maginnis was
deciding whether to undergo a dangerous and aggressive
form of treatment that could cure or kill him within months,
or to let the disease take its course, in which case he might
survive two years.
Like most professional athletes, Heller was cocksure and
felt invincible, and since Maginnis was one of the strongest
people he had ever met, he saw the decision as a no-brainer
— go for the aggressive treatment. High risk, high reward.
“I said in the scheme of things, what’s an extra year if you
can live another 60 or 70,” Heller remembered of one of their
telephone conversations. “I talked to him hard. I said, ‘You
need to get this treatment.’ ”
Maginnis was not so certain. He had been through one
bout of surgery and chemotherapy to fight the disease, and
did not know if he was up to doing it again. The first time, he
dropped 50 pounds and lost all his hair.
“I’m tired of that,” Dick said. “It is not a good quality of life.”
Heller worried his friend was giving up. So when Dick and
Yolando arrived in Atlantic City, Heller drove down to confront
them, to let his feelings be known. Yet when he pulled up to the
front of the hotel, he couldn’t get out of the truck.
“I sat there,” Heller explained. “I knew he and his
girlfriend were inside making this major decision. And I
thought, you know, he didn’t even invite me down here. I
figured he wanted some private time with his girlfriend and
he already knew how I felt.
“I never went up to his room,” Heller added. “I’ll regret
that for the rest of my life, because that would have been the
last time I would have seen him. I turned around and drove
back to Philly and cried the whole way, wondering if I would
ever see him again.”
The story of Richard L. Maginnis Jr. can’t be told without
talking about Richard L. Maginnis Sr. The elder was a professor
of microbiology at Penn State who sustained an aneurism and
died of stroke-like symptoms in 1973. He was 42.
He left behind a large family, who in the late 1960s had
moved from a small house near the current State College Area
High School (and across the street from the legendary Suhey
family) to a slightly roomier place a few blocks away.
There were seven kids, starting with oldest brother Joe
(who was 17 in 1973) and going down to youngest brother
Paul, a newborn at the time. Dick was square in the middle,
just 12 when his dad passed away. Their mom, Maria,
somehow held it all together, even though her second-oldest,
daughter Liana, was mentally challenged.
Maria was so focused on raising her kids the right way
that she never took a job and never remarried.
“In the space of one week, my mom went from wife to
widow, from a good income to very little, from half of a loving
partnership to single parenthood,” said daughter Cathy, who
was 13 at the time. “She must have been devastated, but she
just kept pushing forward: cooking, cleaning, seeing to our
education, making sure we went to church, and especially
making sure we looked out for each other. And through it all
she showed us what it means to be strong.”
It also helped that the family home was situated in the
middle of a friendly neighborhood. Everyone knew everyone.
The high school was less than a mile away, Our Lady of
Victory Church within walking distance.
“We were lucky that a lot of people in the community
chipped in and got us on the right track,” Joe said. “Even
teachers watched out for us. If we started hanging around with
the wrong crowd, they would steer us in the right direction. …
Mr. Suhey [Steve, the former Penn State All-American] would
make routine visits to the house, check report cards, give
advice, that kind of thing.
“The local priests would often stop by the house and
make sure everyone was doing all right,” he added. “We
by no means were angels — we all went through the nutty
teenage years — but there were so many people looking out
for us that we all eventually straightened out.”
As Cathy noted, the kids looked after each other, too, and
Dick was especially helpful in that regard. By the time Dick hit
high school, he was the oldest boy in the house, and helped
take care of Larry (who was born in 1970) and Paul (who was
born in 1972).
Friends recall spending time with Dick in the finished
basement of the family home, watching football games or
shooting darts or playing cards. Larry and Paul were always
underfoot, often wrestling with one another. If things got out of
hand, Dick would stop what he was doing and transform from
the kid he was into a father figure.
“Hey, knock it off!” he’d boom in his deep, slow voice. “Now
go clean your room.” And they’d scamper off, head to the room
and — more likely than not — begin scuffling again. But in the
long term, the boys developed an extreme measure of respect
for a brother who was “big” in every sense of the word.
“In my eyes, Dick was the toughest, wittiest and strongestwilled
figure on the planet,” said Larry, now 38 and working
in the forestry department at the University of Texas. “He
made things happen by his mere presence. As a child and
throughout life, it was natural to look up to him and want to
aspire to that.”
There were four Maginnis boys. Though they all played
sports at some level — Joe was on the football team at State
High, Larry loved outdoor activities such as hiking and Paul
won a national boxing title at Penn State in 1990 — Dick
clearly had the best combination of size and athletic ability. At
State High, he competed for PIAA championships in wrestling
and track (the shot put). Yet he drew the most notice for his
performance on the Little Lion football team, where he was a
starter on the offensive and defensive lines.
Maginnis missed most of his senior season with a knee
injury. But impressive performances at Penn State’s summer
football camps earlier in his high school career prompted the
Nittany Lion staff to offer the 6-2, 233-pounder a scholarship.
The letter from Joe Paterno arrived in mid-January 1979, and
Maginnis quickly accepted, calling then recruiting coordinator
(and now athletic director) Tim Curley to make it official.
“Coach Curley asked me if I was ready to sign,” Maginnis
told the Centre Daily Times. “I told him I had been ready for
10 years.”
He was a late addition to the 1979 Big 33 Classic,
receiving a spot when another player pulled out due to injury.
“A lot of people think that I’m second string, that I’m a
replacement,” he told the CDT the week of the game. “I want
to set them straight. I’m not just a replacement. If I would have
played all year, I could have been here anyway.”
Maginnis impressed the West coaching staff with his
strength and mobility and earned a starting job at defensive
tackle. You may have heard of two of his teammates on the
West — quarterbacks named Dan Marino and Jeff Hostetler.
The West dominated the Aug. 11 game, beating the East 24-2.
A few days later, Maginnis arrived at Penn State for
preseason practice. He initially found himself far down the
depth chart on the defensive line, but by the midway point
of the season was running second team behind senior All-
American Bruce Clark at middle guard. When Clark was
injured in a game against Syracuse at Giants Stadium in East
Rutherford, N.J., Maginnis was summoned to replace him.
Reporters at the game — a 35-7 Penn State victory —
recall the press box announcer being caught off guard by the
appearance of the true freshman.
“Number 71 is going in to replace Clark,” he reported,
fumbling through his notes, “but we don’t know who he is.”
Typically, Maginnis laughed when later told what happened,
and said he couldn’t blame the announcer for not knowing
his name. Two weeks earlier he had been playing on the
freshman team. How did he move up the depth chart so fast?
“A lot of guys got hurt, that’s how,” he told a reporter. “I’ve
been playing with the foreign team in practice.”
Clark was gone following the 1979 season, becoming a
first-round draft pick of the Green Bay Packers. Maginnis took
over Clark’s then-legendary No. 54 in the spring of 1980. It
would not be the last time he willingly accepted the challenge
of replacing a Penn State icon.
Maginnis took a medical redshirt in 1980 due to a knee
injury. But in August of that year, he gained a lifelong friend.
Dean Coder was also a graduate of State High. Though
a few years older than Maginnis, he spent some time in the
military before joining the Penn State football team as a walkon
in the late 1970s. Coder was a scrappy 209-pound center
who never climbed past the lower rungs of the depth chart.
The recruiting class that arrived in 1980 was impressive,
but the on-field accomplishments meant little to the outgoing
Coder. He liked meeting people from different areas of the
country. And so it was on the first day of two-a-days that
Coder approached a 6-foot-6, 220-pound tight end from Long
Island. His name was Ron Heller.
“I heard you guys from Long Island are pretty good guys,
I want to hang out with you,” Coder said.
That was fine by Heller. So they went to Coder’s dorm
room to listen to records, and Maginnis was already there.
Heller saw him and couldn’t stop staring.
“I met him, and he was just a huge man,” Heller said. “He
wasn’t 6-7 or 6-8. But God, he had bigger-than-life features.
A big head and big hands and broad shoulders. … You could
tell he had this natural power that was just ungodly.”
Maginnis was listening to Beatles albums — it was his
favorite band — when Heller came into the room. There
was a quick introduction and before long the three football
players were all belting out tunes along with the records.
Maginnis handled lead vocals with Coder and Heller
providing backup. Think of them as a Fab Three, only without
the ability to actually sing.
“But we sure were laughing,” Heller said.
Those laughs went on for years. The three players spent
much of their free time together, and Heller in particular
was thrilled to find a home away from home in Maria
Maginnis’ house.
“Instead of getting in trouble, we’d be down in his
basement with two or three other guys,” Heller said. “We’d
play pool and darts and whatever. His mother would just load
us with food. It was his way of saying, ‘I know you guys don’t
have any money and you don’t get a chance to buy a latenight
snack, so come on over.’ ”
Dick would yell upstairs, “Maaaaaa!” She’d come to the
top of the steps and he’d follow up with “pizza!” Maria would
come downstairs, pull a couple of frozen pies out of a freezer,
then run up to the kitchen and throw then in the oven. Thirty
minutes later, the whole bunch was chowing down.
“She took care of him, and he took care of us,” Heller said.
“It was awesome. But I look back on it now, and I was a huge
eater, and there were always two or three other guys my size.
Being a single woman, and she wasn’t working, I don’t know
how the heck she did it all.”
In 1981, Maginnis found himself playing behind another
Penn State superstar — offensive guard Mike Munchak.
Maginnis learned everything he could from the multiple-year
starter, studying him in practice, rooming with him on the
road, following a similar routine in the weight room.
Munchak earned second-team All-America honors as
a junior in ’81 and opted for early entry in the NFL Draft. It
turned out to be a wise decision, as he was the eighth overall
pick in the 1982 selection meeting (by the Houston Oilers)
and went on to enjoy a Hall of Fame professional career.
But what Munchak did not get to enjoy — and many
fans forget this — was the thrill of winning a national
championship at Penn State. He and fellow guard Sean Farrell
were both top 20 picks in the ’82 draft, meaning the Lions
would have a much different look up front the following fall.
Despite missing much of spring practice that year
with back problems, Maginnis won Munchak’s long
guard position in the preseason (PSU situated its linemen
according to where it was positioned on the field in those
days). And as fate would have it, Heller, who moved from
tight end at the start of two-a-days, won the starting long
tackle spot. The two buddies were side by side.
Even without the two gifted guards from 1981, the Penn
State offense, featuring tremendous skill players in Todd
Blackledge, Curt Warner and Kenny Jackson, to name a
few, was as potent as ever. While Blackledge and company
received most of the headlines, the offensive line was
obviously the key to it all. And Heller said Maginnis set the
tone for the front five.
“If you watched him, he walked slow and he talked slow,”
Heller said. “Everything about him was very methodical. He
never got excited or worried. That helped him in football; he
was just strong and steady.
“I almost compare him to Munchak because you never
saw Munchak off balance, you never saw him miss somebody.
And they had the same build: shoulders wide, arms powerful.
He wasn’t as gifted an athlete as Munchak; Munchak could
have played tailback. But you looked at Dick and you knew he
had some power to him.”
Penn State lost only one game in 1982 — at Alabama
— but rallied to face Georgia for the national championship
in the Sugar Bowl. The Lions were practicing for the game
on campus in early December, and in the locker room after
one of the sessions Maginnis was talking to Heller and
several other linemen.
“I hope we win this game for Mark Battaglia,” he said
out of nowhere. The other men in the group looked at him
a bit sideways. Sure, Battaglia was a great guy, a true team
player who patiently waited his turn before earning the
starting job at center as a fifth-year senior in 1982. But why
would Maginnis be hoping for a national title for him as
opposed to anyone else?
“That guy stayed all those years just for a chance to start
and a shot at a national title,” Maginnis said. “I hope it pays off
for him. This is his last shot. I have another year to try.”
It did pay off for Battaglia and everyone else on the
team. Penn State beat Georgia 27-23 on New Year’s Day,
1983, to capture the school’s first national title. And in the
most memorable photo from that game — the one of Paterno
being paraded around the Louisiana Superdome following
the victory — you can see Dick Maginnis, a huge smile on his
face, in the lower left corner of the frame.
Maginnis had one more year left at Penn State, but life
would not get any better than that particular moment.
By the program’s high standards, 1983 was a bust. It
began with an embarrassing 44-6 loss to revenge-minded
Nebraska in the inaugural Kickoff Classic at Giants Stadium
and continued with ugly home losses to Cincinnati (14-6) and
Iowa (42-34). Though Penn State went 8-1-1 the rest of the way,
things actually went downhill for Maginnis.
In a game at Boston College in late October, he twisted a
knee. He wanted to leave the game, but his linemates urged
him to stay on the field. Eagles quarterback Doug Flutie was
in the process of passing for 380 yards, so it was clear Penn
State would need every point it could get.
Maginnis kept playing. But it wasn’t enough, as the Lions
lost, 27-17. Worse still, by favoring his knee, he hurt a disk in
his back. He missed the remainder of the season, spending a
good portion of that time laid up in Hershey Medical Center.
Maginnis traveled to the Aloha Bowl for Penn State’s game
with Washington, but he didn’t play.
“I’m more worried about being able to walk straight and
not having a back problem the rest of my life,” he told the CDT.
Penn State won the game, 13-10. For all intents and
purposes, Dick Maginnis’ football career was over.
Nine of the 11 offensive starters from Penn State’s 1982
national championship team were drafted into the NFL the
next two years. Only one of them (guard Pete Speros) went
lower than the fifth round.
The two starters not drafted? One, obviously, was Maginnis.
The other, as fate would have it, was the guy Maginnis was so
concerned about back in December 1982, Battaglia.
Maginnis earned a free-agent tryout with the Kansas
City Chiefs. They gave him a $5,000 signing bonus but cut
him when he could not pass his physical due to his bad back.
Feeling as if he had let the team down, he asked if it was OK if
he kept the $5,000. Coaches explained that the money was his
when he signed.
Maginnis got back to State College and called Heller, who
was a fourth-round draft pick by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
and starting his first camp.
“I didn’t get a shot at pro football,” Maginnis said. “But a
pro football team paid me money.”
Heller, who played 12 seasons in the NFL and developed
into one of the best offensive tackles in the game, still
wonders what might have been had his buddy stayed healthy.
“I guarantee that he would have been drafted in the top
three rounds, maybe a first-rounder,” Heller said. “But who is
gonna take someone with a back injury?”
As it turned out, no one.
A rehabilitation education graduate of Penn State,
Maginnis eventually landed a job at The Meadows Psychiatric
Center just outside of State College, serving as a mental
health technician. He did most of his work with adolescents.
People who worked there at the time say he connected with
kids, some of whom landed at the facility because their
psychological problems were leading to criminal behavior
and some who were there just because they were struggling
to cope with life.
“He was fun to work with,” said Dianne Rudel, a nurse at
the facility in the late 1980s. “The kids didn’t screw around
when he was on duty. But they really liked him. He had a way
of relating to them.”
Dealing with kids who had emotional issues was anything
but easy. But Maginnis found it so rewarding that he returned
to Penn State for a master’s degree in counselor education.
His goal was to find a job where he could really help troubled
youngsters.
Zook was another nurse at The Meadows, and in time she
began dating Maginnis. And in time they became engaged.
And in time they set a date to be married.
But time ran out before they could start their life together.
In April 1988, Dick was playing pickup basketball when he
caught an elbow in the back. It hurt, but, after dealing with the
aches and pains of major-college football for five years, he thought
nothing of it. But the pain did not go away and then became worse.
At the prodding of his family, he went to the hospital for an exam.
Without explanation, he was told he would have to
see a specialist that same day, so he went. And that doctor
determined that Maginnis had a cancerous tumor in his
abdomen, which was putting pressure on the old back injury
he sustained at Penn State. Maginnis was admitted to the
hospital on the spot — his car still in the parking lot — and
had two surgeries over the course of the next month to
remove the tumor.
Then he began chemotherapy treatments.
By this time, Heller was a star offensive tackle with the
Philadelphia Eagles, but he still kept in close touch with
Maginnis. When he heard of the cancer diagnosis — and
knowing the willpower his best friend had — he responded
almost matter of factly.
“I was too cocky at the time to think it was dangerous,”
Heller said. “I’m playing pro football, and in my mind, I’m
invincible, which is the way you have to think. Yet I looked up
to Dick’s toughness. So when he told me this, I said, ‘What do
you have to do to get rid of it?’
“When he had cancer, a lot of us were laughing,” he
added. “We were like, ‘Poor cancer has finally met its match.’ ”
Heller was in for a rude awakening when he returned to
State College for The Second Mile Golf Tournament in June
1988. Maginnis had bulked up to 270 pounds following his
graduation from Penn State, but the chemotherapy treatments
and surgeries had ravaged his body. He was below 220
pounds, a weight that on his massive frame made him look
skinny. He had huge scars on his stomach. His bushy mustache
was gone, as was his wavy head of hair.
But his sense of humor was as sharp as ever. Noticing
his friend was having trouble accepting what had happened,
Maginnis broke the ice.
“Go ahead and say it: I look like a Perdue chicken,” he told
Heller. Then he continued cracking wise. “However, there is a
positive side. There is not a single hair on my body, anywhere.”
Heller’s initial instincts appeared to be correct, though,
when Maginnis slowly returned to health. By the end of the
summer, his hair was growing back and he was gaining
weight. He returned to work at The Meadows and began to
finish up his graduate work at Penn State. In November, tests
showed his body was cancer-free. The family had a party,
and Maginnis showed up wearing a shirt that said, “Dick 1
- Cancer 0.”
Maginnis got back into the weight room and started running
10 miles a day. In the spring of 1989, he decided to leave The
Meadows to do an internship at a rehabilitation facility in the
Harrisburg area. He went to live with his maternal grandparents,
who owned an Italian restaurant in Harrisburg. And after putting
their initial wedding plans on hold, Dick and Yolanda were trying
to figure out when to get married.
“Life was back on track,” his brother Joe said.
In June 1989, Dick returned to State College for routine
tests. Suddenly his life was off track again. The cancer was
back. And it had spread through his body.
Maginnis was left with a choice. He could undergo a
bone marrow transplant that was just as likely to kill him as
cure him. Or he could let the cancer run its course and die
within two years.
Dick and Yolanda headed to Atlantic City to talk about it.
Ron Heller drove down to let his thoughts be known, but
couldn’t bring himself to confront his best friend. He cried the
whole way back to Philly. He cries when talking about it now.
In retrospect, by the summer of 1989, there was little
doubt as to how this story would end. Testosterone-based
bravado aside, cancer was going to win. And Dick Maginnis,
true to everything he stood for in his 28 years on the planet,
was going to go down swinging.
He chose the aggressive treatment and opted to have it
done at a place with a history of success with the procedure
— Indiana University Hospital in Indianapolis. He arrived
in late July, and when the staff saw how much time he was
spending with the cancer-stricken children in the hospital,
they soon moved him to the pediatric area of the cancertreatment
center.
“He was good at giving them confidence in their fight,
too,” Joe said. “Dick would always call us and let us know
everything was going well and not to worry about him. But he
would ask for someone to bring him stuffed animals that he
could give to the kids. It was sweet.”
Over the next two months, everyone in the family made the
10-hour drive to see him at least once. Younger sister Nora and
her husband Dan practically lived in Indianapolis at the time.
By early September, Dick was really struggling. On Sept.
8, he began calling his family and friends to let them know he
might not make it. When he finished talking to his mom, he
told her he loved her and said goodbye.
“I didn’t want to say goodbye to him, and he was upset
because of it,” Maria said. “I just didn’t want to say goodbye. I
was afraid to do it. I didn’t want to do that.”
That same night, Heller called. At that point, the old pals
were talking by phone every day.
“They got it all, they zapped everything,” Dick said. “They
tell me if I can make it through until 6 a.m. tomorrow, I can
beat this thing. I’ll win. That’s the critical time.”
Heller couldn’t sleep. Though the Eagles’ season-opener
against Seattle was less than two days away, he waited until a
few minutes after 6 a.m. and called Dick’s room at the hospital.
“I said, ‘Yeah, is Dick around?’ ” Heller recalled, his voice
cracking with emotion. “The guy kind of broke down and
cried. It was a janitor or orderly, and he said, ‘I guess you
haven’t heard, son, Mr. Maginnis just died.’ ”
The story of Richard L. Maginnis Jr. can’t be told without
talking about Maria Maginnis. Born in Italy, her family came to
the United States in the 1930s. She learned to speak English in
elementary school and later attended College Misericordia, then
an all-women’s Catholic institution in Dallas, Pa. She spent time
as a teacher before marrying Richard Maginnis Sr. in the 1950s
and starting a family. They had seven kids in the span of 17 years,
and Maria’s profession changed from teacher to mother.
When her husband died at the age of 42 in 1973, Maria
did what she felt she had to do to keep the children in check.
There was a 7 p.m. curfew. They were required to attend
church every Sunday. They had to look out for each other. She
was so protective, she would write their names in their coats
and books, lest someone at school try to steal them.
Where Maria’s children are now is a testament to her
success in a single-parent household.
Oldest brother Joe is a high school principal. Nora, who
was in the room when Dick died, is a nurse. Cathy is a middle
school teacher who works with special education students.
Larry is in the forestry department at Texas. And Paul is a
physician’s assistant in State College. All are professionals
with college degrees. All are still extremely close to one
another and their mom.
As for Liana, well, she is without question the shining
example of Maria’s dedication to her children. Born mentally
challenged, she is now 49 and still living with 77-year-old Maria
in the family house on Edgewood Circle in State College.
Maria beams when she talks about her oldest
daughter, bragging on Liana’s latest accomplishment in
the local Skills Development Program the way she talks
about Dick’s athletic endeavors.
“They’ve all turned out well,” Maria said. “They’ve all
done a good job.”
As the years go by, the memory plays tricks, and the
mind’s eye embellishes the positives. Inherently, when people
die we focus on their good qualities; perhaps because we
hope that is the way folks will remember us.
“A guy could die robbing a bank, and everybody will talk
about him, saying what a great person he was and he was the
apple of their life and stuff,” Heller said. “But honest to God,
the thing about Dick was his caring for other people. He just
wanted to make sure that the other people around him were
happy and all right.
“He was so … not selfish,” Heller added.
Dick maintained that quality until the very end.
In the final conversations he had with each of his brothers
and sisters, he made them all promise they would send their
mom something nice for Christmas every year.
“And they do,” Maria said. “Always.”