James DeAngelis, 97, Last of Yale's Ironmen

By WILLIAM N. WALLACE

James DeAngelis, a son of immigrants who became a Yale football celebrity and who was the last survivor of its famed 1934 lineup of Ironmen, died Wednesday in Wallingford, Conn. He was 97.

He died of natural causes, said his son, James P. DeAngelis.

DeAngelis, a 165-pound center and linebacker, was one of the 11 players on an ordinary team that upset Princeton on Nov. 17, 1934 ending the Tigers two-year winning streak of 15 games. There were no substitutes for Yale that afternoon, the starters enduring for the full 60 minutes, a feat never matched in college football thereafter.They also became known as Vale's Ironmen, a tag that each to theend of his life.

DeAngelis was a townie, a New Haven youth "from the other side of the tracks," as he described himself in an interview for the book "Yale's Ironmen," (William N. Wallace, lUniverse, 2005). He was born Mariano Vincenzo DeAngelis; his father was a bricklayer and stonemason when he could find work and his mother a factory worker.

"I had no business going to Yale," he saidin the interview. "It was circumstance and luck that got me there,"

After graduation from high school, DeAngelis took a job with the local telephone company until he was persuaded to attend the nearby Milford Academy. His support came from a patron, Clarence Blakeslee, the head of a New Haven construction company and a benefactor of boys in need. After two years there, DeAngelis was accepted at Yale from which he graduated in 1935 with a bachelor of science degree.

He was too poor to have much of a social life, he later recounted. His Yale teammates included John Hersey, the author, and Larry Kelley, an all-America end and recipient of the Heisman Trophy in 1936. Kelley caught the touchdown pass that resulted in Yale's 7-0 victory over Princeton, a result voted sports' foremost upset of 1934 in an Associated Press poll.

It was DeAngelis, on the game's opening kickoff, who tackled Ken Sandbach on the Princeton two-yard line, the first of a series of mishaps for the Tigers. Later, he stopped running back Homer Spofford two yards short of the end zone during the first of four goal-line stands for the Bulldogs.
DeAngelis distinguished himself in football and basketball. throughout: school and college. He later became a football coach at Yale and at Bates, Toledo Nebraska and Washington, before and after World War II, in which he served as a Naval officer.

He returned to the New Have area in 1953 and became a sales manager for automobile dealerships and then for a concrete pipe company in Hamden. He retired in 1991. For the past decade, he was a resident of Ashlar Village, a retirement community in Wallingford.

"He lived a life that his parents could never have imagined," said his son, a retired professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is his only immediate survivor.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2007

THE BOOK INTRODUCTION

A handsome girl who had come down from Smith College described a fall football Saturday at Princeton as an occasion so splendid as to be regal, royal. “I felt like a princess,” said Gloria Conn in retrospection.

“Then I looked around and saw a lot of other princesses.”

Miss Conn’s tenure as a Princeton princess came in the 1940’s after World War II, a golden time on many a campus. The university had had no women undergraduates since its founding in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, nor would it have any until 1969. Women, as social companions, were invited ---imported.

Thus favored, they made considerable effort to reach the Princeton scene --- or somewhat similar ones at Yale, at Harvard, Dartmouth and other all-boy colleges. There was the lesser nearby Amherst, a deuxieme invitation for Smith girls.

Miss Conn, and a handful of other Smith sensations, arose at 5 A.M. in Northampton, Mass., to catch the New Haven Railroad’s southbound express at Springfield that would deposit them at Princeton Junction six hours later. Then came “the last mile,” the quaint two-car train that ran from The Junction into Princeton proper, a bouncy 12-minute rail experience that exists to this day.

“You were nervous,” said Miss Conn. “Did you look okay? Had that pimple gone away? Would your date be there to meet you? Or had he gotten so besotted the night before as to forget?”

Upon returning Sunday night the custom in Miss Conn’s residential house there, the small one called Henshaw, was that the girls who had been on the road assemble and each give an unvarnished account of her weekend: all its thrills or gaffes --- the bold beau or the bumbling boy.

“Princeton was always so beautiful,” she said. “The courtyards, the arches, the walkways, the trees in color. And the parties --- it was hard not to have a good time. No matter how dim the date.”

Well, what about the football?

“You learned quickly when to cheer,” she said. “And when to shut up.”