Mark Montieth: ‘The greatest guy who ever walked in shoe leather’

On the list of topics sports fans in central Indiana want to read about this week, a sportswriter who died more than 60 years ago probably doesn’t rank high.

Please indulge me, anyway, because Angelo Angelopolous was the greatest writer of sports, if not the greatest writer of everything, ever to work in these parts and deserves to be remembered. Not only for his work but also for his war experience, his humanity and the tragedy of an abbreviated life stained by unfinished business.

The Indianapolis News writer was so respected that his passing in October 1962 was treated as a major story in the local newspapers, even one he didn’t work for. Glowing tributes were written; local sports icons served as pallbearers; and awards, foundations and scholarships were established in his honor.

Most of those people and forms of remembrance have faded into oblivion, as tends to happen after 60 years. His primary opportunity to leave a lasting memory, a biography of Indianapolis 500 champion Bill Vukovich, never advanced past a manuscript. He and his wife had no children, and the only remaining relatives who met him are a couple of nephews, Peter and Charles Kirles.

So, here’s a tribute to an influential man who left behind a hard lesson: Even if you have it all—talent, charm, looks and a large following—life has a way of leveling the playing field one way or another. If nothing else, the clock can always run out on you prematurely.

About 15 years ago, after becoming familiar with his work and curious about his life, I talked with some people who were close to him. They talked eagerly of an elegant writer and dapper dresser and courageous companion who made friends everywhere he turned. The word “classy” came up a lot.

“An all-around great person,” said former Butler football coach and Athletic Director Bill Sylvester. “I can’t say enough good things about him.”

“The greatest guy who ever walked in shoe leather,” said friend and fellow World War II veteran Danny Folsom. “He had no ego. He was soft-spoken, polite and considerate.”

Perhaps the greatest summary of Angelopolous’ legacy came from a rival, Indianapolis Star columnist Bob Collins, who took over as the city’s premier sportswriter after Angelopolous passed. Collins recalled being intimidated by Angelopolous’ talent before joining him in the media but then growing to admire him on a personal level. He was the kind of guy you didn’t resent, Collins wrote, even when your wife was commenting on his good looks.

“Few people wore as well on their fellow men,” he added.

‘He had a feel for people’

The public, however, knew Angelopolous only through his writing. In an era when the printed word ruled the communication industry and people turned to afternoon newspapers that were unburdened by tight deadlines to venture deeper into the sports world, writers such as he were hugely influential.

“English, used properly, is a beautiful language,” Collins wrote. “And Angie was master of all its subtleties. He could turn a phrase, this man could, and he had a feel for people and a rare ability to transmit emotion—and belief—to paper.”

Angelopolous was both a native and champion of Indianapolis. He grew up on the west side in an ethnic neighborhood and attended Manual High School, where he was a class officer and president of the honor society. He also was a member of a city championship basketball team in 1936. He rarely played, but his future was in chronicling sports, not playing them. He went on to Butler, where he was sophomore class president, editor of the school paper, and a member of various journalistic and academic honor societies.

He turned pro while still in college, working as a correspondent for the News, and was hired full time in 1940 almost as soon as he could take off his cap and gown. He interrupted his newspaper career, however, to enlist in the Navy’s pilot-training program a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, a heroic but life-altering decision. He returned after the war in 1946 and worked for the News until 1956 before venturing into freelance work.

His personal life seemed as seamless as the professional side of it. He was happily married to a local model, JoAnn. They were a glamorous couple, popular in the prominent social circles. The News once ran a photo of them on its Society Page, seated at a table during the Indianapolis Press Club’s Front Page Ball at the Columbia Club.

Triumph, tragedy

The highlights of Angelopolous’ newspaper career can be summarized by two columns written within a 10-week window in 1955—one about a joyful triumph and the other about a horrifying tragedy.

He had championed the Attucks program that sliced through social headwinds to become the first school from Indianapolis to win a state championship, as well as the first all-Black school in the country to do so. The transcendent significance of that achievement was an elephant-in-the-room angle for the first of its two consecutive titles, but most of the sportswriters ignored it or tap-danced around it.

Angelopolous took dead aim, writing: “A Negro team, for the first time, has won the highest athletic honor the state has to covet … and you want to say that man, at least in this little section of the world, has taken a step forward.”

That column appeared in the March 21 edition of the News. His May 31 submission was a polar opposite, covering the death of Bill Vukovich, the two-time defending Indy 500 champion who was killed in a fiery five-car crash on the backstretch of that year’s race. Angelopolous and Vukovich were close friends despite Vukovich’s natural resistance to letting people into his circle. JoAnn recalled Angelopolous had once rushed over to Vukovich’s residence to retrieve the racing shoes he had forgotten the day of an earlier 500.

Writing about his friend’s death was gut-wrenching, but Angelopolous struck the right chords, as he had with Attucks in March.

Acknowledging his friendship with the driver, Angelopolous wrote, “He didn’t just grow on someone, he burst full-blown with the first contact and the hero worship swamped all the professional resistance.”

Among the anecdotes Angelopolous included was the time the driver’s fashion-conscious daughter made a pre-race request to her mother: “Tell Daddy to stick his foot in it, ’cause I need some new clothes.”

He concluded with, “Most of May seemed out of whack at the Speedway, and race day was no exception. The auto racing world will be a long time getting over this one.”

Longtime Indiana sportswriter Bob Hammel still recalls that column and some of its details. He was 18 years old and working full time for the Huntington Herald-Press in 1955, an eager and impressionable writer who considered Angelopolous the ultimate role model.

“He gripped the emotion but wasn’t maudlin about it,” said Hammel, a member of the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame that should include Angelopolous, as well. “It was a masterful piece.

“He had that capacity to touch the soul of the story.”

Failing health

Angelopolous’ intimacy with his craft showed up even in the routine stories that are a sportswriter’s stock in trade.

A season preview of Butler’s basketball team referred to “the quest for the pot of goal at the end of hundreds of rainbow shots.” He was a senior at Butler when he wrote that one.

When the Rochester Royals had a hot shooting game against the Indianapolis Kautskys in March 1946, he wrote they had “hit everything but high C.”

When IU’s football team defeated Minnesota in October of that year, he wrote, “Blue skies and a friendly sun make a lovely day, but nothing looks so pretty as a scoreboard that might read: ‘Our Fellas, 21; The Other Guys, 0.’”

Too talented to be contained by a mere newspaper, Angelopolous moved to Ridgefield, New Jersey, in 1956 to broaden his professional horizons. He covered major events in New York City and wrote for several national magazines, such as a profile of Oscar Robertson for the Saturday Evening Post. He also continued to make steady contributions to the News, which kept him on the payroll. And he dove into what was meant to be his signature career achievement, a biography of Vukovich. The tentative title was “The Man Who Wouldn’t Lift.”

The manuscript remains in the possession of nephew Peter Kirles, filled with edits. Kirles isn’t sure what kept it from reaching book form.

Perhaps Angelopolous’ failing health was a factor. He had contracted leukemia in his mid-30s in the mid-1950s. His firm belief was that it was caused by radiation exposure while he fulfilled an assignment to fly over Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb in August 1945. JoAnn said government officials later told her nine pilots in the 16-man squadron that included her husband died of blood disorders.

He and JoAnn moved back to Indianapolis in 1959 to be near family and friends as his health continued to falter. But he never stopped working. His war buddy Folsom, who had lost his 5-year-old daughter to leukemia, chauffeured Angelopolous to some of his final assignments, including a trip to Rensselaer where the Chicago Bears were conducting training camp at St. Joseph’s College. Angelopolous’ reputation was such that some interview subjects even went to his home to make it easier for him.

Always optimistic

One of his last stories was an ode to News Sports Editor Bill Fox, who had hired him out of college and rehired him after the war. Angelopolous had just attended a retirement dinner for Fox along with the rest of the paper’s sports staff. He had less than two months to live, and the toll of his disease was painfully obvious in the group photograph taken that night.

“You knew he was dying,” said Lyle Mannweiler, who had joined the staff as a copy boy that summer and is the only surviving staffer from that time.

It’s worth mentioning that Angelopolous was smiling in the photo. Friends say he never complained about his fate and always talked optimistically of a recovery despite the mounting physical evidence to the contrary.

He died at home on Oct. 14, 1962, at age 43. Looking at it one way, his life was cruelly cut short. Another way, and probably the perspective from which he would have viewed it, he was a war fatality who got to live another 17 years before the radiation exposure finally got him.

Either way, he became a legend worth remembering.•

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Montieth, an Indianapolis native, is a longtime newspaper reporter and freelance writer. He is the author of three books: “Passion Play: Coach Gene Keady and the Purdue Boilermakers,” “Reborn: The Pacers and the Return of Pro Basketball to Indianapolis,” and “Extra Innings: My Life in Baseball,” with former Indianapolis Indians President Max Schumacher.