 
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
New Book About Old Game
Here is a book of the Seabiscuit genre about a Princeton-Yale game that took place 71 years ago, a book entitled Yale’s Ironmen: A Story of Football & Lives In The Decade of the Depression & Beyond.
Seabiscuit: An American Legend was the 2001 non-fiction book by Lauren Hillenbrand that took an all-but-forgotten 1937 match between two race horses as the pebble tossed into the pond from which the ripples --- the characters --- made a book, a best seller and a movie.
Similarly that Princeton-Yale contest, which he saw as a 10-year-old spectator, produced personal ripples for the distinguished prize-winning author, William N. Wallace, a retired New York Times sportswriter now a freelance based in Westport, Conn. In a recent interview Wallace replied to questions about the origins of the book.
Q: You state that this was the most significant game of the 125 between the two teams. How could that be?
A: The most significant from Yale’s standpoint and the reasons are two. First, an ordinary Yale team (3-3), at the least a 5-to-1 underdog, upset Princeton which had not lost in two years.
Between 1933 and 1935 Princeton teams won all their games but this single one. Second, the 11 Yale men played without substitution for the full 60 minutes, the last time this ever happened in college football. Thus they became The Ironmen forevermore.
Q: It took place so long ago. Why would anyone remember, or care?
A: That was a compelling reason to write the book, to tell the story before it faded away. And it’s quite a story. Two Ironmen, center Jim DeAngelis and quarterback Jerry Roscoe, were friends with good memories that I was able to tap. Roscoe died, at 91, before I got the book done, which I regret enormously. But Jimmy is still with us, at age 95.
Q: How can one game make for a 200-page book?
A: There’s more than just the game, the latter like a pebble dropped in a pond. The ripples made the book.
Q: An example?
A: The planning on Yale’s part was considerable. The backfield coach, Greasy Neale, was something of a genius. The 78-page scouting report gave Neale an idea that was exploited for the touchdown pass that won the game, 7-0. Roscoe called the play. Coaches weren’t allowed in those days.
Q: Who scored the touchdown?
A: Larry Kelley. He is the celebrity in this story, all-American end and Heisman Trophy winner. In the Yale archives there’s more on Kelley than anyone else. He was a fascinating character who takes up the final two chapters and whose life ended in suicide, as did that of Pepper Constable.
Q: Pepper who?
A: Constable was the gallant Princeton fullback, president of his class every year, later a renowned doctor in the Princeton community who came down with Alzheimer’s disease.
Q: Did you know all this stuff all these years?
A: Most of it. You see, I was at the game as a 10-year-old and distinctly recall Kelley leaping to snare an overthrown pass with one hand. The game received a tremendous play in the newspapers and I like to believe it led me to a newspaper career. Or so I told Kelley.
Q: You met him?
A: Yes, just once. We had a nice chat and he made me laugh.
Q: You cite the Depression in the sub title. The significance?
A: In those troubled yeas only about 10 or 12 per cent of all male high school graduates went to college and that fall Yale had its smallest freshman class in several years. The Depression was a reason. The book sets the scene in 1934.
Q: What about afterward?
A: After the game the Princeton fans were so furious some of them spat on the Tigers, according to one of the players, Gil Lea. A few years later almost all of them, Princeton and Yale, were embroiled in World War II.
Q: Why did you wait so long to write this story?
A: I had written sports books years before but found the experience unrewarding. Around 1998 I was asked to write a 1,500-word magazine piece about anything and I chose The Ironmen. It got cut to 500 words after some more ads were sold. So I had 1,000 good words left over. DeAngelis had been urging me for years to write such a book. I had Roscoe’s 24-page single-space handwritten account of his experience that he had compiled in 1994 for another author, who hardly used any of it. And I had two of Kim Whitehead’s scrapbooks from 1934-1936. I figured I had to do it, or else I’d kick myself forever.
Q: Who was Whitehead?
A: The fullback, and a neighbor in Fairfield. He too had been after me to do something about The Ironmen. After Kim died I saved the scrap books from being thrown out. He was the Yale captain the next year,1935. But his life after that had tragic downside in it.
Q: Like what?
A: It’s in the book.
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