STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - They came by the thousands - in Nittany blue sweatshirts and jeans, and in dark suits stretched taut over athletic frames.
They came in snow boots to ward off a tolerable winter chill and, in a style nod to the man they came to mourn, in loafers with stark white socks.
They came in wheelchairs, in strollers, one even on crutches, all to pay their final respects to a coach who left an indelible mark on their university and, for many, their lives.
More than 10,000 Pennsylvania State University students, alumni, former players, townspeople, and sports-world luminaries queued up Tuesday in lines that stretched longer than a football field for the chance to shuffle, one by one, past the casket of record-setting football coach Joe Paterno.
"He's just a legend," said Barb Barkovich, 71, of Johnstown. "He gave to his family. He gave to his community tremendously. He took a small-town school and made it what it is today."
The public viewing ceremony - the first of three memorials planned by his family this week - drew onlookers from as close as a campus dorm to as far away as California.
Paterno's family planned to host a similar viewing Wednesday morning before private funeral and burial services in the afternoon. A public memorial service is scheduled for Thursday at the university's 16,000-seat Bryce Jordan Center.
Penn State officials said they ran out of 10,000 free tickets to the Thursday event within seven minutes of making them available online Tuesday morning. A few appeared later for sale on the Internet auction site eBay.com but were pulled by the company and greeted with angry derision by many who saw them for sale, including the university president, Rodney Erickson.
But, like Paterno himself, who famously lived in a simple ranch-style house in State College, Tuesday's memorial was notable as much for its simplicity as for the overwhelming attention it drew.
The coach's closed, unadorned casket sat atop a dais in the austere Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, a building to whose construction Paterno and his wife, Sue, donated $1 million. A simple arrangement of white roses rested on the casket, a black-and-white photo of the coach in his trademark black-frame glasses to its left.
Throughout the day, a rotating honor guard of two football players - one current, one former - stood to either side, as the throng trundled by single-file for more than 10 hours.
