Former Kutztown University assistant track and field coach Irving “Moon” Mondschein passed away on Friday. He was 91 years old.
There will be no funeral services at Mondschein’s request.
The obituary below was posted Sunday in the New York Times. For the full story, please follow: Irving Mondschein, Decathlete, Coach and Track Patriarch, Dies at 91
Irving Mondschein, a national champion in the decathlon and high jump in the 1940s, a college and Olympic coach and the patriarch of three generations of track and field stars, died on Friday in Hershey, Pa. He was 91.
His family announced his death.
Moon Mondschein, as he was known — his surname means moonlight in German — excelled in track and field’s supreme test, the 10 events of the decathlon. He won the National Amateur Athletic Union decathlon championship in 1944, ’46 and ’47 and was runner-up at the 1948 and ’49 nationals to Bob Mathias, a two-time Olympic decathlon champion.
Competing in track and field for New York University while also an outstanding end on its football team, Mondschein won the N.C.A.A. high-jump championship in 1947 and tied for the title with Dike Eddleman of the University of Illinois in 1948, both clearing 6 feet 7 inches.
Mondschein was considered a leading contender for the decathlon gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics, but he finished in eighth place. Mathias, who was 17 years old, won the event.
Mondschein coached the United States track and field team that competed in Israel at the 1950 Maccabiah Games, the Jewish Olympics. He then tutored Israeli track and field athletes in preparation for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, using a combination of English and Yiddish, and becoming their head coach.
Mondschein, whose father, Max, and mother, Yetta, were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, recalled how “to be in that place at that time and what it meant for Israel was thrilling.”
“My chest must have swelled five inches as we marched into the stadium with the Israeli flag,” he once told the sportswriter Stan Isaacs for the website TheColumnists.com. “I think my father was more proud of me about that than anything else I achieved.”
Mondschein was a longtime assistant and head coach at Penn and an assistant coach for the United States Olympic team at the 1988 Seoul Games. He coached in high school as well and was inducted into the U.S. Track and Field & Cross-Country Coaches Hall of Fame in 2007. Penn named its new track and field throwing venue for Mondschein in 2014.
His son Brian was an all-American in the decathlon at the University of Washington. His other son, Mark, was a Pennsylvania high school champion in the pole vault. Mark’s son Brian was an all-American at Virginia Tech as a pole-vaulter.
Bob Phillips, the Virginia Tech pole-vault coach, told The Roanoke Times in 2004 that “his family is kind of like track royalty.”
Irving Mondschein was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 7, 1924. He was an outstanding track and field athlete at Boys (now Boys and Girls) High School, then attended New York University for one year before entering the Army.
He won the 1944 A.A.U. decathlon while stationed in Brooklyn, then won two more titles after being discharged from military service.
He finished third in the balloting for the 1947 Sullivan Award as America’s most outstanding amateur athlete, behind the rower John B. Kelly Jr. and the hurdler Harrison Dillard.
At 6 feet 2 inches and 200 pounds or so, Mondschein played offensive and defensive end, and sometimes running back, at N.Y.U. for three seasons and was an all-East selection.
He was an assistant and then head track and field coach for Penn from the mid-1960s to 1987. He was a head coach at Lincoln University and an assistant at Villanova, LaSalle and Kutztown University when his son Brian was the head coach there.
He was a volunteer coach at Haverford College into his late 80s. His son Brian is now assistant coach of the women’s track and field team at Princeton.
Mondschein and his wife, Momoe, who survives him, lived in Havertown, Pa., until two years ago, when they moved to an assisted-living center in Hershey.
In addition to his wife, his sons Brian and Mark, his grandson Brian and another grandson, Stephen, he is survived by a daughter, Ilana Mondschein; a sister, Roslyn Lampert; and a great-grandchild.
Mondschein’s specialty in the decathlon provided a supreme challenge. Played out over two days, the decathlon comprises sprints and runs, hurdling, high-jumping and broad-jumping, pole-vaulting and throwing the shot put, discus and javelin. The Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon is often considered “the world’s greatest athlete.”
Mondschein tried to steer his grandson Brian toward the decathlon, to no avail.
“He’d be a hell of a decathlete, but he’s goofy about the pole vault,” Mondschein once said.
Mondschein’s pride in his family’s devotion to track and field stood out. “It’s very unique, to have three generations in the sport like we do,” he said. “We’re all track junkies.”
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