Lincolnite led Wake Forest back to respectability in the '50s
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BY KEN HAMBLETON / Lincoln Journal Star
Paul Amen had a dream that Wake Forest and Nebraska would play football a lot more often than once every 25 years.
But Wake Forest’s visit to Memorial Stadium on Saturday marks only the second game between the two teams ever and the first since 1970.
Amen’s idea of a nonconference rivalry between the two schools was going to help both teams recover from the depths of football despair.
During a visit to his hometown in the summer of 1959, Amen said: “We’re both at the low ebb, and it’s not easy to come back overnight.”
While Nebraska was struggling until 1962, Amen seemed the answer to Wake Forest’s problems.
In early 1956, Wake Forest was in transition.
The entire school was moving 120 miles from the town of Wake Forest to Winston-Salem, N.C., and the administration was looking for a football coach to break the Demon Deacons out of their slumber.
Among the 70 candidates were Michigan State assistant coach Bob Devaney and Amen, an assistant football coach and head baseball coach at Army.
Wake Forest chose Amen and regained respectability it hadn’t had on the football field since the 1940s.
The Lincoln High graduate, former NU three-sport standout and former Olympian earned Atlantic Coast Conference coach of the year honors in 1956 and 1959.
Devaney, well, he took the job at Wyoming in 1957 and left there after the 1961 season.
Amen, who graduated from Nebraska in 1939, began coaching when he helped Biff Jones coach the Huskers to the Rose Bowl in 1941.
After World War II, Amen worked as an assistant under famous Army coach Red Blaik, whose staff over the years included Paul Dietzel, Sid Gilman, Vince Lombardi and Eddie Crowder.
“We loved Army, but this was a great chance for my father,” said Karen Amen, the oldest of four children of Florence and the late Paul Amen.
Paul Amen died in Lincoln last June.
“It was a big change to go from West Point, N.Y., to a Baptist college in North Carolina,” Karen Amen said. “But the people there appreciated my dad. He was known as the ‘Gentleman coach.’”
Amen’s first team finished 2-5-3. Wake Forest was 0-10-0 in 1957 and 3-7-0 in 1958. But, with the help of quarterback Norm Snead, the Deacons finished 6-4 in 1959 — the only winning team at Wake Forest between 1948 and 1970.
“Paul Amen knew football,” wrote the late Marvin “Skeeter” Davis, the longtime sports information director at Wake Forest. “He brought life into the campus and into the football team.”
While he was coaching, Amen brought his family to Lincoln often. He turned down a chance to be the Nebraska athletic director in 1954 and again in 1961, but he stayed loyal to his alma mater.
In January 1960, Amen left coaching for good.
Following the advice of a neighbor, he took a job with Wachovia Bank in Winston-Salem. He was a part-time scout, working for Gil Brandt of the fledgling Dallas Cowboys. By 1968, Amen was president of the National Bank of Commerce in Lincoln. In 1979, he was named Nebraska state banking director.
“He always rooted for Wake Forest, but you know his blood was Nebraska Big Red forever,” Karen Amen said.
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