Leader of the Pack
Ted Vartelas, patriarch of UConn’s biggest family and Ansonia’s favorite son, died Wednesday
Ted Vartelas, the son of a big Greek family, patriarch of UConn’s biggest family, and a man who spawned a thousand stories, died Wednesday night at Yale New Haven Hospital.
Vartelas, who played basketball at Southern Connecticut and at UConn, was 89. Coronavirus took his life, nephew Greg Stamos
said.
Yes, coronavirus took another great Connecticut life.
“I was so close with Uncle Ted,” Stamos said Thursday. “He was the last of my mother’s 11 siblings, the baby of the family. A whole generation is no longer with us.
“I loved that guy. His friends would say, ‘He’s your best buddy … He’s like your big brother.’ ”
Until three years ago when he was hit with Parkinson’s disease, Vartelas was a regular at Ansonia football and Yale basketball games. He went from 85 acting 55, Stamos said, to 86 with the body of a 96year-old. He was staying at The Willows nursing facility in Woodbridge.
“They locked it down (with the COVID-19 outbreak) and the loneliness was heartbreaking,” Stamos said. “When he was afflicted with this two nights ago, virtually my entire family, including his three children, said, ‘God take him quickly and painlessly.’ God did.
“We had a couple of days to come to grips with it, to prepare ourselves. We ran the gamut from sorrow to long engaging recollections.”
There even was time for some humor. The family decided Ted, without an NCAA Tournament to watch this March, just couldn’t take it anymore.
He was the son of Greek immigrants, John and Paraskeve Vartelas. John had a family market at the center of Ansonia. For years the market thrived before it was swept away on the Naugatuck River in the Flood of 1955.
Stamos grew up a couple of football throws from Nolan Field in Ansonia and said there was anywhere from 12 to 14 people living in their house at one time, depending on who was and wasn’t getting married.
“We used to joke that the flood was a pivotal moment for the family, that my mother and all her siblings would still be making ham sandwiches,” said Stamos, an attorney in Ansonia. “They all had to find their way in the world.”
Ted would become a forever agent for New York Life Insurance, one of its top 1-percent in performance.
Before that, he was a three-sport athlete at Ansonia, all-state in basketball. Ansonia beat Hillhouse at its height in the late 1940s, but Hillhouse got its revenge that season in front of a sellout crowd at New Haven Arena in the state semifinals. Bob Saulsbury, later coach at powerhouse Wilbur Cross, was the star at Hillhouse. He and Vartelas became lifetime friends.
“It was remarkable to watch that friendship among competitors and across racial lines,” Stamos said. “Sports is a great leveler, isn’t it?”
Stamos took Saulsbury to visit Vartelas two months ago before COVID-19 hit. Legendary New Haven baseball coach Porky Vieira, a basketball scoring machine at Bridgeport Central and Quinnipiac, competed against Vartelas in the semi-pro Connecticut Basketball League. They, too, forged a longtime friendship. Porky came to visit at The Willows.
Allan Webb played for the New York Giants and later was an NFL executive. Carl Ajello served as state attorney general from 1975 to 1983. Vincent Drake went on to quarterback in the Canadian Football League. These were Ted’s Ansonia guys.
“All from one little area,” Stamos said.
After a year at Cheshire Academy, Vartelas played a year at SCSU, known then as New Haven State Teachers College. He was in the top 15 in the nation in scoring. Vartelas played two years at UConn, coming off the bench on a team with Art Quimby and Worthy Patterson. He played around the country in Greek-American tournaments. On the Ansonia Norwoods, Vartelas played with 7-footer Bill Spivey, a Kentucky All-American blackballed from the NBA, and Patterson, who played briefly with the NBA’s St. Louis Hawks. They played against the likes of Wilt Chamberlain and Bob Cousy. Ted was a fastpitch softball pitcher of some note, too.
Before the UConn game in February 2012 when he was inducted among the Huskies of Honor, Patterson spotted Vartelas across the Gampel Pavilion court. He and his wife made a beeline for Ted.
That made Stamos smile. He has so many Vartelas stories.
Like the time Uncle Ted knocked on the door of his elementary school classroom. The teacher went over and told 9-year-old Greg he needed to go with Vartelas.
“What’s going on?” Stamos asked as they left.
“We’re going to a game,” he answered.
It turned out to be the iconic one in December 1964 at Madison Square
Garden when Bill Bradley scored 41 points for Princeton against No. 1 Michigan and Cazzie Russell. Bradley fouled out with 4:47 left and Michigan erased a 12-point deficit to win, 80-78. A few years later, they went to see Lew Alcindor play for UCLA before the old Garden closed. Ted took Stamos to every home game at the Yale Bowl, taught him basketball, taught him tennis. They would go to 30 Final Fours together.
That’s not a misprint. “We went to Super Bowls,” Stamos said. “We’d go to the U.S. Open every year.”
Stamos caught himself. “This is all sports,” he said. “Teddy was a pretty eclectic guy. I want to set the record straight on that. Like he passed on a love of jazz.”
And a taste of classical piano.
Ted had started dating a girl from New Haven — Esther would become his wife — and he took an 11-year-old Greg along one night.
“I’m going to introduce you to something you should learn about,” Ted told him.
It was a Van Cliburn concert.
“He only had two tickets and, of course, somehow Teddy got me in,” Stamos said. “He was something. He’d sneak me into games and go, ‘OK, now we can afford hot dogs!’ He had the Greek equivalent of chutzpah. He was full of life.”
Teddy pledged to Sigma Chi fraternity at UConn in 1952. He had mentioned that the mayor of New York, Vincent Impellitteri, was an Ansonia native. Well, Ted and another pledge’s assignment was to get Impellitteri’s autograph. The two hitchhiked to New York and went to City Hall. The mayor’s secretary asked if they had an appointment.
They didn’t. Ted said, “Can you tell him John Vartelas’ son is here. I just need a minute.”
A moment later they heard, “Send them in.”
Impellitteri asked him about the family market and how everyone was doing. Ted told him about the autograph.
“If I give you an autograph,
they may think you forged it,” Impellitteri said. “He called up the photographer. He took the picture and in an hour he had it developed.”
Stamos texted me the photo from nearly 70 years ago. It’s a true story.
Two years ago, Ted was still going to Ansonia football games in his wheelchair. Parkinson’s took its toll. On Wednesday night, coronavirus took his life.
“We were driving once when I was a kid and he said, ‘I remember in high school there was a bunch of kids picking on a kid. I didn’t jump in to intercede and to this day it troubles me.’
“He liked to talk about kindness. He loved to reach out to others.”
This kind of kindness: In 2011, Greg’s daughter Angelika hit a two-run double to dramatically lift Sacred Heart over top-ranked Seymour for the school’s first state softball championship.
“Whenever he saw Anjelika after that, despite all his accomplishments, he’d tell her that was the happiest moment of his life,” Stamos said. “That he’d wake up in the middle of the night, think of that and it put a smile on his face. He loved his family.”
At the 2013 UConn football homecoming game, the Vartelas/Stamos/Heerdt/ Vlandis clan was honored as winners of the “Biggest UConn Family” contest. Among them was a dean of admissions, a number of UConn athletes …
“Teddy was the patriarch of a group,” Stamos said. “There were 25 of us who went to UConn. President Herbst had us for dinner. We went on the field. They put us up on the big screen. It was a lot of fun.
“Ironically, another cousin committed to UConn a couple of days ago. We shared the news and a couple hours later we got the fateful phone call Ted had been afflicted. Matt Cristiano is Ted’s brother’s grandson. He’ll fill the slot vacated by Ted. We’re still 25 strong.”
Still Ansonia’s and UConn’s biggest and best.