Editor's note: This is the second in a series counting down the top five tailgates at Beaver Stadium. Along with nominations submitted to the Mirror, tailgates were observed, sampled and ranked by the Mirror's Josh Langenbacher. The series will count down during the remaining home games, and the overall winner will be published on the day of the Nittany Lions' bowl game.
UNIVERSITY PARK - John Horon still makes the drive from Philipsburg to State College for Penn State football games, arriving about three hours before kickoff and staying about three hours after the game ends.
But when the game starts, Horon stays put in his parking spot in the shadows of Beaver Stadium.
Fed up with Penn State's regulations, Horon stopped going inside about five years ago.
"You can't drink inside, and you can't come out at halftime," Horon said. "That's the biggest thing. Why should I go in there and pay for a ticket for half a game? I want to come out, use the tailgate. That's what we always used to do, then we'd come back in. Now you can't do that, so there's no sense."
Horon, who recently retired as the vice president of Lee Industries, helps play host to a large tailgate a couple hundred yards behind Beaver Stadium. Lee Industries sets up under a double brown awning and has a large flat-screen television, two bartenders working an open bar and many kinds of food, snacks and desserts.
Before Penn State played Syracuse, for example, part of the spread was shrimp, cold cuts, a vegetable tray, pretzels, chips, cookies and apple pies.
Horon began tailgating in 1986 but moved to his current spot about 10 years ago.
His wife, Sally, remembers a game so cold that deviled eggs froze and "shattered like glass" when they fell.
That same day, people stood next to propane heaters and got so close their plastic cups melted.
"I had to tell them, 'Get away! Get away! You're gonna get burnt,'" John Horon said. "They didn't feel it they were so frozen."
But more than that, Sally Horon remembers the students who would drop by the Lee Industries tailgate. A few still come by to say hello, but the tailgate had its regulars while the students were still undergrads.
"They always knew we had food, and I always made sure they got fed," Sally Horon said. "We knew after so many years they went on their way."
One of the attendees at the tailgate before the Syracuse game Sept. 12 was Ron Beck, who left Tyrone at 7:30 a.m. and arrived in State College at 8. He heads to his seat in section WB about an hour before kickoff, then stays to tailgate afterward.
He has been coming to Penn State games since the mid-1960s when his parents first brought him as a 9-year-old.
And while he was impressed by the Lee Industries tailgate, he said his purpose for coming was the game.
"It's just what every tailgate is: the food, the people, a great atmosphere," Beck said. "But quite frankly, I'm here for the game. The tailgate's just the icing on the cake."
For Horon, the tailgate is more than that.
"You have the crowd noise," he said. "You just don't have the people around you. I can still hear it. It's not the same as being inside, but I'd rather let people who haven't been into the game go. I've been doing this for 20-some years, I've been to all the big games. There's no big game to me anymore."
