Thousands of Penn State students swarmed into the streets of downtown State College one night, sparking a two-story-high bonfire and damaging parking meters.

The university president, aiming to prevent another such disturbance, pleaded with students to change their attitude:

"Even a thousand football victories can't offset such a demonstration of a lack of control . . . Soon we must ask the Legislature for a 50 percent increase in the school's appropriation from the state . . . I must meet these people, request this money, meet their criticism. I must explain student action," the then university president said.

The year was 1938 and the president was Ralph Hetzel. What students needed, he said, was a dedicated place for students to celebrate on campus.

That place would become the Nittany Lion Shrine, and it was a series of rowdy mobs that helped to kindle the project, according to the way Jackie Esposito and Steven Herb tell the story in The Nittany Lion: An Illustrated Tale, recently out in paperback from Penn State Press.

"Instead of a simple gathering place for bonfires," they write, "the Lion Shrine became a powerful symbol of all that was good about Penn State, and a beacon for alumni who wished to revisit and remember an important time in their lives."

But the beacon has suffered its share of bumps and bruises over the years. Tonight at 10 p.m., the Lion Ambassadors carry on their annual homecoming tradition of "guarding the Lion Shrine" at a free block party with food and entertainment on the recently renovated grounds of the limestone statue.

"Our protection of it is kind of nice and sweet," said Steven Herb, head of the Education and Behavioral Sciences Library. "This is the last remnant of non-athletic intercollegiate rivalry."

Herb said the guarding has become largely symbolic in recent years, but it dates back to a time when the Lion became the target of pranks from both outside and inside the Penn State community.

In 1966, the week before the football team was set to face Syracuse University, Sue Paterno and two other football wives dumped orange water-based paint on the statue in the hopes of enraging students and breaking their apathy.

"We pulled it off and escaped," she told Herb and Esposito in 1995. "However, later that night, some Syracuse fans were caught by the police for dumping oil-based paint on the Lion.

"Joe (Paterno) and the husbands were working Friday morning . . . They assumed we had been the vandals and had been arrested. Fortunately, we were all home with our children," she said.

Penn State lost the game by two points, but Sue said it inspired the annual vigil and attracted the largest home football crowd that year.

It wasn't the last time Syracuse fans discolored the icon, either.

"When you have orange as a school color, I think that you get cranky," Herb said, with apologies to fans from the New York state school.

With renovations to campus traffic flow completed this week, drivers can now peek out their windows at the lion as they turn onto the new Curtin Road extension from North Atherton Street.

The Lion Ambassadors are planning to set up games, food tables and a band stage on the large swath of grass added to the lion's lair.

"We're having a carnival-style atmosphere this year," said Jen Primerano (junior-advertising and public relations), a member of student corps.

This weekend, ROTC members will be doing the actual guarding, but the rest of the year, that job goes to the Office of Physical Plant.

"The lion shrine always receives special attention from OPP," office spokesman Paul Ruskin wrote in an e-mail. "Our landscape crews frequently apply special protectants to the statue's surface, and Shawn Wood is the OPP employee who has primary responsibility for keeping the lion in tip-top shape."

Construction crews are still cleaning up after paving the new stretch of road, but Ruskin said there will be more landscaping in the spring, including 100 new trees.

The 59-year-old statue next to Rec Hall was actually completed after the stuffed trophy mountain lion inspired the name and the first football game mascot suited up.

After a series of Daily Collegian editorials and support from President Hetzel, the Class of 1940 narrowly voted to pick the shrine as a senior class gift.

Penn State commissioned German-born sculptor Heinz Warneke to complete the project, which was finally unveiled in October 1942.

Like the orange paint incidents, early vandalism to the Lion was "more humiliating than permanently damaging," Herb and Esposito write.

That is, until someone whacked off the feline's right ear in 1978.

Warneke flew to campus in the summer of 1979 to mold a replacement ear, but not before shedding a few tears at the sight of his wounded creation.

After completing a plaster cast in two days, he said, "I feel good now. I feel good. I think I can smile," according to Herb and Esposito's book.

It was another stone carver who actually completed the repair, and Warneke died in 1983, before he could see the lion again.

A jagged scar is still visible around the base of the lion's right ear today.