LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) – Paul Amen, a former University of Nebraska sports star and Olympic baseball player who was fired as state banking director after a financial scandal, died Saturday at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital. He was 89.

His daughter said Amen had suffered from Alzheimer’s for five years.

The son of German-Russian immigrants, Amen was a native of Lincoln and a three-year letter winner at Nebraska in baseball, basketball and football in the 1930s. He coached football at West Point and Wake Forest in the 1950s before turning to a banking career and coming back to Lincoln and the presidency of the National Bank of Commerce.

Then-Gov. Charles Thone appointed Amen state banking director in 1979. Amen was fired from that job by then-Gov. Bob Kerrey in 1983, 15 days after the $68 million collapse of Lincoln’s Commonwealth Savings Co. More than 6,700 depositors lost money in the failed industrial loan and investment company.

Amen’s daughter said investigations by the FBI, the Nebraska State Patrol, the Lincoln Police Department and banking regulators never provided a factual basis for all the accusations.

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June Edmondson

MUSKOGEE, Okla. (AP) – June Edmondson, wife of a former Oklahoma congressman and mother of both the state’s attorney general and a state Supreme Court justice, died late Friday of complications from pneumonia. She was 85.

June Edmondson met and married her late husband, former U.S. Rep. Ed Edmondson, while both served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

They moved to Muskogee, his hometown, after the war and raised their children: Supreme Court Justice Jim Edmondson; Attorney General Drew Edmondson; the late Tad Edmondson; June Anglin, a Colorado attorney and mediator; and Brian Edmondson, an elementary school counselor in Moore.

For 20 years, Ed Edmondson served as congressman from Oklahoma’s 2nd District, and June Edmondson managed households in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C.

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Edward Schwarm

BARNSTABLE, Mass. (AP) – Edward Schwarm, an electrical engineer whose work on the Apollo space program helped NASA land the first man on the moon, died last month of skin cancer at his home on Cape Cod. He was 82.

Schwarm was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when the school teamed up with NASA on the Apollo missions. He developed some of the technology used in the Apollo 11 mission, the first lunar landing, and was part of the team that helped the Apollo 13 astronauts return safely to Earth.

Schwarm also was an accomplished inventor who owned 11 patents for innovations in space aviation and electronic power systems.

During World War II, the Milwaukee native left the University of Wisconsin at Madison to join the Army. In England, he was a second lieutenant and engineering officer, supervising a 120-member crew that repaired B-24 bombers. He also frequently filled in as a co-pilot.

He started working at MIT in the 1950s. In the 1970s, he founded an electronics consulting business that conducted some of the first research on high-speed electric trains.

Schwarm and his wife of 62 years, Erla, were world travelers who visited all seven continents and sailed around the world three times. She died two months ago.

AP-ES-06-05-05 1947EDT