St. Dominic won the state Catholic High School Football League championship in 1975, in Tom Capozzoli's final season as head coach. His son Tony, a senior, was named first-team Parade All-American, and he committed to Penn State as a quarterback and a kicker. Todd Hodne, Dave Smith and John Poggioli had one more season together, and though Hodne and Smith once had a fistfight on the school stairs, Hodne and Poggioli were thought to be best friends. In truth, Poggioli said he remained in the friendship because he didn't know how to get out. He was drawn to Todd Hodne and he was afraid of Todd Hodne in equal measure, and Hodne made him pay every time Poggioli tried to emerge from under his sway. When Poggioli was a junior, he told Hodne that he might try out for the school play; Hodne responded by sneering, "You're no actor," and dumping a pail of water on his head. When Poggioli had a crush on a girl named Janet, he wouldn't dare ask her out because Hodne, though not her boyfriend, had claimed her. "In my four years at St. Dominic, nobody asked me out because they were so afraid of Todd," Janet Shalley remembers now. "I could only date boys from other schools. And back then, I had it going on."
Though she decided not to fight him, her mind never stopped resisting. Even when he flipped her over and sat on her chest, with his knees straddling her shoulders, she kept trying to see around the margins of her blindfold and then the pillowcase he had put over her head, kept trying to glean information she could use later to identify him or use now to stay alive. She saw his thumb and knew he was white. She saw the soles of his sneakers and the stitching of his jeans and knew what he was wearing. And yet she was still telling herself that he was there to rob her. "You can take my jewelry," she said. "I'll tell you where it is."
Weman Fight Then Fuck Pic
When Joe Paterno and Penn State told the story of 1978 and 1979, it went like this: in 1978, he lost his chance at the national championship through a failure of nerve, and then in 1979, he lost control of the team. There was the team captain who refused to finish a lap; the star cornerback who, along with two others, was ruled academically ineligible; the running back caught driving drunk; the linebacker arrested for fighting and the lineman busted for drinking on campus; and, finally, at the Liberty Bowl, the substitute tight end who showed up in a suburban bedroom in the middle of the night and was lucky he didn't get shot. These incidents were widely covered in newspapers and magazines, first one at a time and then in an onslaught. "Suddenly, it seemed like we were a bunch of felons down here," Penn State Sports Information director Dave Baker said in 1980.
Despite his best efforts, Todd Hodne did not destroy all of them. Just as they fought for their lives then, they fight for their lives now. They not only can't forget him, they don't want to, because that means some part of themselves would be forgotten. The 21-year-old secretary who was ambushed in the parking lot of a bustling shopping mall in Garden City is 64 now; she doesn't want to talk about what she went through nor does she want her name used. But she wants her story told, so she has given her husband the task of telling it. He was her boyfriend in 1979, so he has lived with it too, and he remembers the aftermath of May 12, 1979, through the lens of nearly lifelong family attachment. It was her parents' wedding anniversary, he says. She had gone to Roosevelt Field to shop for a Mother's Day gift. For many years, she couldn't shop in stores because of the memories associated with that experience, and even now, her parents' anniversary is a bittersweet milestone. "I can tell you, it has had an effect on her through her life," her husband says. "A lot of times we forget about it and life is normal. But there have been years where I've said, 'What's the matter?' And she'll say, 'It's my parents' anniversary.'"
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