Horn Scholarship reaches historic high with donations

For someone who cannot speak, who can no longer even move, Robert C. Horn III, ’64, continues to say more and move more people than anyone you are likely to meet.

A scholarship fund in his honor is now the largest grass roots fund-raising effort in Wittenberg history.

Single donors or foundations have created other large scholarship endowments, but Horn’s is the first created by numerous gifts to exceed $100,000.

When someone like Horn touches your life, the impulse is irresistible to do something — something meaningful that is as life affirming as Horn himself.

For his Phi Gamma Delta brothers, and Kappa Delta sisters, endowing a scholarship in Horn’s name proved to be a popular outlet for that impulse.

A decade ago Horn was already a successful man. As a husband, father of three, a favorite political science professor, and an authority on the Soviet Union and foreign policy in the Third World, good fortune had been heaped on Horn in abundance.

But in June 1988 Horn’s body began to unravel, literally. Afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), the connections between his brain and his muscles quickly became undone, leaving him totally paralyzed.

For the rest of his days, life would now take place within the restrictions of a bed, a feeding tube and a ventilator. Strangely, Horn’s life did not unravel.

Having been separated from all of what people take for granted as the most modest quality of life, Horn continued to “battle,” as he puts it, and focused on what he had left — his family, his friends, his mind.

He began a new career as an author, writing letters, sports articles for the Los Angeles Times and sermons for his church.

First specialists outfitted Horn with a headband to allow him to “type” on a specially configured computer using nothing but the muscles in his eyebrows.

When the disease robbed him of that control, Horn’s narrowing window to the world moved to one muscle in his foot that he could still influence. For someone like Horn, one foothold is enough.

One full day of intense “typing” could yield Horn a half page of words. In 1997 he published a 120-page book on his experience titled How Will They Know If I’m Dead: Transcending Disability and Terminal Illness.

The book brought Horn nationwide attention. But the story of how Horn turned a terminal disease into a disability and then that disability into a new ability drew old Wittenberg friends together who had taken separate paths for 30 years.

The effort to build a Horn scholarship fund was kept moving by fellow fraternity brothers Douglas M. Brown, ’64, Gilbert Belles ’62, and David Hopper, ’63, who were then joined by Lynn Carlton, ’64, Bill Steinbrink,’64, Sally Schaefer James‚ ’64, Tom Knowlton, ’64, and others.

This loving conspiracy of Phi Gamma Delta brothers from the classes of 1961 to 1966 also brought support from other alumni and from strangers inspired by Horn’s strength.“The fund drive turned into a focal point for clusters of guys getting in touch again,” Belles said.

“The FIJI motto is ‘Not for college days alone.’ This became real to many of us for the first time.” It also created a competition between the Phi Gamma Deltas and Kappa Deltas.

“I think my mom (J. Marie Schneider Belles, ’31) donated just to keep the KDs in the contest for the numbers,” Belles said.
Bob’s wife, Judy Eppers Horn, ’64, was a KD.

Her strength and dedication in dealing with her husband’s condition is another beautiful and inspiring part of the Horn story, according to Belles. She even invented a special alphabet board to help her husband communicate.

Thanks to this scholarship effort, Wittenberg students who never knew Bob Horn will learn about him for years to come.

They will be Horn Scholars such as Brittnee A. Finnearty, a senior geology/East Asian studies major from Athens Ohio, who will continue her studies in graduate school next year.

--JD