Some people are Renaissance men. Huntington’s Angelo Rum was a Renaissance reg'lar guy.

An electrical engineer by vocation, he played clarinet and saxophone throughout his life, “and when arthritis started taking over his hands, he switched to trombone,” said his daughter, Sharon Rum-Reichhold, of South Huntington. He bowled in leagues at Melville Lanes, now Bowlero Melville, including a parent-child league, “and we wound up winning third and then first place, two years in a row,” said his son, Paul Rum, of Huntington.
In his twenties, he was accomplished enough as a photographer to earn an honorable mention in a contest held by The Newark Museum, now The Newark Museum of Art. He would carve wooden cars and trains for his grandchildren, and build the decks on his family’s home.

“I could show him a picture in a catalog or magazine,” Rum-Reichhold said, “and say, ‘Can you make this table? This shelving unit?’ And he would make it and save me hundreds of dollars.”

Angelo Rum, who died June 1 at his home of natural causes at age 94, “was just too good, and I would get annoyed with him,” quipped his wife of 70 years, Joyce Sona Rum, a childhood sweetheart from the same block in Newark, New Jersey. “He never got angry. I mean, he got angry, but he never cursed, he never argued with me — which used to burn me because I liked to argue!”

Born Angelo Amadeo Rum in Newark on Aug. 30, 1930 — with a middle name he never used and which would be misstated as “Amil” and “Albert” in things like high school yearbooks and Army discharge papers — he was the elder of two sons of Italian immigrants Gino Rum, a housepainter, and homemaker Giovanna Maria Andreini Rum, who generally went by Mary. The family’s last name was not an Ellis Island bowdlerization, Rum-Reichhold said, but an ancestral one dating to at least the 1700s.

After graduating from St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark in 1948, Angelo became a TV set assembler at FADA Radio and Electric, in Belleville, New Jersey. Drafted into the Army in 1951, he served as a radio operator in Japan during the Korean War. Upon his discharge as a corporal in 1953, he continued working for electronics companies and attended the Newark College of Engineering at night, eventually earning a degree.
In a reader essay for Newsday in 2021, he recalled first seeing Joyce in 1944 when he was 14 and she a slightly younger trick-or-treater. “She became best friends with my cousin Lucy and, therefore, I would see Joyce periodically over the years,” he wrote.

Becoming sweethearts, they married on May 21, 1955. After living for a time in Union, New Jersey, they moved to Huntington in 1965 when Angelo was hired by Telephonics there. At some point, his family said, he earned a master’s degree from Stony Brook University.
An involved father who would come home from work and maybe play a game of HORSE basketball with one of the kids before even stepping in the house, Angelo Rum sometimes served as everyone’s dad, his daughter said. During the Blizzard of 1978, “We were all at a party, and then the blizzard hit and nobody's parents would come get them,” Rum-Reichhold recalled. “My father came with his station wagon and drove everybody home. Took three hours.”

Restless and not the sort to retire, his family said, Angelo Rum continued working into his 90s, most recently as a salesperson at New Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon. But, said his wife, the couple did manage to take cruises to Italy and Spain during his nonretirement.

In addition to his wife, daughter and son, Rum was survived by two more daughters, Gina Rum-Murphy, of Blue Point, and Donna Rum, of Pennsylvania; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. His younger brother died in 1972.
Following visitation on June 5 at M.A. Connell Funeral Home, in Huntington Station, a Mass was  celebrated the following day at the Church of St. Patrick, in Huntington. He was cremated, and his ashes interred at St. Charles / Resurrection Cemeteries in East Farmingdale on June 20, with military honors.

Donations may be made to Visiting Nurse Service & Hospice of Suffolk, in Northport.