Ivan (John) Notchev and his contributions to Apollo?

[Daggerstab]

Could someone help me find information about this person? I've been able to locate few reliable sources in English.

Notchev is sometimes mentioned in lists of Bulgarian achievements, such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bulgarian_inventions
As you can see, he is listed as having "constructed the engines for the lunar module used during the first landing on the Moon" ("constructed" is a bad translation due to a "false friend", the intended word is "designed").

Sources in Bulgarian usually embellish the claim, failing to put it in proper context and/or providing background claims that are outright wrong (e.g. "no soft landing on the Moon before Apollo 11"). A source also claims that Notchev's funeral was attended by three presidents ("Carter, Reagan and Bush"), which is one of the reasons why the whole story makes me quite suspicious - embellishing, exaggerating or outright fabricating history to stroke the national ego is a common pastime on the Balkans and Bulgaria is no exception. (This applies both to "official" history and to "common knowledge" factoids spread by non-specialists. An example in the same genre is John Atanasoff - undoubtedly a smart guy, but his contributions get badly lost in translation mangled in summarization in Bulgaria.)

I've only been able to find his obituary in the LA Times, which confirms part of the information:
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-20/local/me-450_1_memorial-service

Notchev was born in Karlovo, Bulgaria, and emigrated to the United States via Canada in 1957. He became an American citizen in 1962. Notchev was employed as a senior design engineer at the General Dynamics Convair Division from 1957 to 1965. He worked on the Apollo space program and the Triga reactor for General Atomics.

It's still unclear what exactly he did work on, though. (Another Bulgarian source claims that he worked on the legs of the lander )

[Daggerstab]

Of course, what I should have remembered immediately is that the LM was created by Grumman. I checked Wikipedia for the subsystems and apparently none have been done by General Dynamics Convair. So the story is not just exaggerated, but outright wrong. I'm still curious what he did exactly, though, and how he ended being promoted as a "forgotten genius". I think I'll need to do some research offline for that, though.