Edwyn Owen
Edwyn Robert "Bob" Owen was an American star hockey player at Harvard and played on the 1960 U.S. hockey team that won an Olympic gold medal for the United States. He later battled schizophrenia.
Ice hockey
Owen grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and attended Harvard University, where he was a defenseman on three Ivy League championship teams. In 1957, he won Harvard's Angier Trophy for the player who made the greatest improvement. He graduated from Harvard in 1958. At his induction into the Harvard Varsity Club Hall of Fame in 1982, he was described as a "hard-hitting player who could move an opponent from in front of the net."He was on the 1960 Winter Olympics hockey team with several of his Harvard teammates, including Bill Cleary and Bob Cleary, winning the gold by beating Canada, the Soviets and Czechoslovakia. It was the nation’s first gold medal in men’s hockey.
Mental breakdown
He visited Communist countries with the U.S. national hockey team in 1959 and worked on classified projects at a balloon company Raven Industries in Sioux Falls, South Dakota beginning in 1960. He later described these times to his friends as specifically troubling and paranoia-inducing.Owen had a breakdown in 1963 in San Francisco. In the late 1960s, he moved to Topeka, Kansas where he committed himself to the Menninger Clinic for treatment for schizophrenia. He would be released from the in-patient facility three years later, but never moved more than four miles from the hospital.