Adamarie Easton, 93, the wife of a legendary Kansas University track and field coach, died Thursday morning, her son, Richard Easton, said.

She was living with her daughter in Atlanta.

Millard “Bill” Easton won two NCAA outdoor track and field championships for KU in 1959 and 1960, among numerous other achievements during his more than three decades as a KU coach.

He also coached the 1968 Mexican Olympic team, and before he was at KU, he won cross country NCAA titles with Drake. Bill Easton died in October 1997.

Adamarie’s son says she was a major part of the coach’s success.

“She was always there to help him, to entertain sports writers and to be kind of a mom to some of his track men,” Richard Easton said.

His mother also loved all sports, which was why she was so happy in Lawrence, he said.

“Their whole lives were just Kansas for the 30 years that they lived there,” said Richard Easton, a KU graduate and now a physician in Virginia Beach, Va.

She also proved to be a strong support for the family.

“She encouraged all of us in whatever we did,” he said.

During the five years that Bill Easton trained his Olympic team in Mexico, Mrs. Easton also made the trip, her son said.

One journalist has recalled her support of her husband and his KU athletic teams. Former Journal-World sports editor Bill Mayer described one scene with the Easton Express, a station wagon on the highway that traveled next to runners in training.

“As I recall, the driver was Bill’s devoted wife, Ada, who mothered hundreds of Jayhawks and always was in the mix,” Mayer wrote in a Journal-World column published April 25, 2004.

“Ada had much, much to do with Bill’s long string of successes, in athletics at Drake and Kansas, as a summer camp operator and in various businesses,” Mayer wrote in a column on June 9, 2002. “With each always picking up where the other left off, they constituted an unofficial Easton Corp.”