We are Penn State, but Jim might be a little bit more Penn State than most...

One of my facebook friends is the "Penn State Nittany Lions." Today, Father's Day 2010, their newsfeed read: "Happy Father's Day to all of the Dads out there and an even bigger wish to those who are Penn State Proud!!"

Only one person had commented at that point, and I felt stirred to write a little something for my dad.

I wrote: "I was raised Penn State proud by my dad, Jim Campbell. He's a State College native who gave Penn State not only his loyalty, but his career years, too. My dad belongs to a rare breed of Nittany Lion, born and bred in the shadow of Mount Nittany. He traveled all over Pennsylvania spreading the gospel of a Penn State education, and all three of his kids either went there or work there. We are Penn State, and so are all of you."

I'm Penn State proud. I was raised to be this way because my father is about as loyal to Penn State as anyone I know.

He grew up in Lemont, a little neighborhood on the southeast side of State College. He played in the creek that ran through his backyard. He played Pony League baseball. He listened to Penn State games, Steelers games and Pirates games on his radio. He wrote poems and listened to rock and roll music. He sprained his wrists winning a schoolwide sprint competition (the other guy broke his wrists) that, for some unmitigated reason, took place with a finish line a scant ten feet away from the gym's concrete wall. He got a second-degree sunburn working the flower gardens on campus in the summers. He hauled furniture for the PSU Office of the Physical Plant. He washed dishes at the HUB, where he met my mom.

He got a full-time job working in Continuing Education for PSU after he finished his bachelor's degree. He'd be the first to admit (and he often does) that this job was quite a lucky break. At the time he started, CE was a relatively new field. Now called Outreach, it accounts for somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of the University's tuition revenue. Basically, he got in the ground floor of an operation designed to bring even more career-making educational opportunity to people all over the state, the nation, and the world. He sold people on the possibility of achieving their dreams by making themselves better, smarter, more skilled people.

From the time we were very little, my brother and sister and I were given countless Penn State shirts and hats to wear. Many of these were freebies Dad picked up from summer camps, which he built to be a large-scale success at the Penn State Wilkes Barre branch campus in the Back Mountain, where we grew up. I was given books and articles about Joe Paterno to read from the time I was about six years old. Quotes of Paterno's became a cornerstone of my own sense of self, ideas rooted in hard work, humility, confidence, excellence and, as the letters ringing Beaver Stadium now say, success with honor, a will to do well but to do things rightly and without cutting corners or at another's expense.

Penn State (and my mom) more or less saved my dad. He could easily have been a sad statistic. His family fell apart in his early adolescence and he ended up in a foster home. This family that took him in, the Hostermans, set him on a path towards living the right kind of life, and education was a crucial facet of that experience. His older brother, Rob, found his way to Penn State in spite of the challenges of his family life, and Dad followed after to PSU. A troublemaker as a teen, he ended up majoring in Criminal Justice, but a stint on the road with the state troopers showed him just how much he didn't want to be a cop. All his part-time jobs with the University over the years parlayed into his lucky break in CE, which in turn led to thirty-plus years of service to Penn State.

He now gets to enjoy an even more lucky early retirement in his hometown, volunteering his time to help build homes for those in need and provide food for the hungry with organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the CROPWalk.

My dad always used to say to me, "I am so grateful that nothing I have to do in my job can really hurt anyone. Education is something that can only help people. I don't make Penn State better at the expense of others. I make Penn State better by helping other people get something valuable from their education. I'm so lucky I get to do this."

The Paterno ethic is strong in my father. He keeps his head down, works his hardest, tries his best to treat everyone fairly and kindly, deflects praise to his teammates, maintains a healthy self-deprecating sense of humor, and takes good care of his family. I never really thought of this before, but the Latin roots of Paterno lead back to the word for "father."

I sent my teen years and early twenties in State College, and I got not one but two degrees from Penn State, and I've been a "We Are!"-shouting Nittany Lion fan for basically my whole life, but I'll never be the Lion my own father is, and I'm okay with that. So much of what makes me a decent man comes from him, and I'm happy to keep striving towards that ideal for as long as I'm able.

That famous and simple chant of PSU fans where one half of the stadium yells "We Are!" and the other side shouts back "Penn State!" has always given me chills. There's something in the water here in Pennsylvania that makes this place unique and wonderful, warts and all. I love living here and I will always be a PA kid at heart, no matter where life takes me. "We are Penn State," to me, means more than just a school or a football team, it's an inclusive motto that says we're all Pennsylvanians together, all welcoming anyone else to be a part of things, all doing our best, all trying to be what God or the universe wants us to be. Win or lose, that sentiment is one I cherish.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. I love you. Thank you for living your life the way you do and setting such a constant example of honorable excellence. Thank you, too, for introducing a starstruck five-year-old to the magical Greek-and-Romanesque theatricality of Beaver Stadium in the fall that rain- and mud-soaked Saturday in 1984 when Notre Dame came to town. Thank you for sharing that and other inspirations of yours (the power of words, the beauty of a forest or a beach, the wonder of family) and letting them inspire me, too.