History won’t be kind to Angelo Mozilo, the founder of Countrywide Financial whose shareholders approved the company’s sale to Bank of America yesterday. His is a great American success story, but a tragedy, too.

Difficult times for a company mean difficult times for its board of directors.

And these certainly are difficult times for Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings and loan.

Because of losses related to subprime mortgage lending, the Seattle-based firm has closed operations, cut jobs, slashed its dividend, and watched the price of its stock plummet to its lowest level in more than 11 years, closing Friday at $13.07.

Angelo Mozilo, who made news this week with his startlingly candid assessment of the nation’s housing market, is a self-made man.

To pay tuition when he attended Catholic high school, he got a job with a mortgage company during the week and continued to work in his father’s Bronx butcher shop on the weekends, according to his biography with The Horatio Alger Association.