Bob Owen

Bob Owen was a standout both academically and on the hockey rink at his high school in St. Louis Park, Minnesota and carried this success to Harvard where he graduated with honours in English and was a member of the great Harvard class which included Bob McVey and Bobby Cleary. Still, in 1957 he was voted by his teammates the Donald Angier Trophy given to the Harvard hockey player who shows the greatest improvement over the course of a season. After graduation Owen took a job with a company doing classified research into high altitude balloons and was recruited to play for the US national hockey team. Owen played hockey for Team USA for two more years, during which time he made the 1960 Olympic team. Owen eventually attended Stanford Business School, obtaining an M.B.A. in 1964 but in the middle of his studies he suffered a severe mental breakdown. He was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and spent three years as an in-patient at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas at the end of the sixties. He recovered sufficiently to become a professor of business at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas in 1973 but periodic schizophrenic episodes would haunt him for the rest of his life. Owen died in tragic and mysterious circumstances in 2007. His body was found in the burnt out wreck of his car in a field outside Topeka. Forensic reports determined that the car’s catalytic converter had set fire to dry grass and that had caused the car to burn ferociously. Although the death was determined accidental, fiends and relatives had reported Owen’s behaviour in the last few days of his life as somewhat erratic.