An Indomitable Figure : Bob Horn Led Chatsworth Girls’ Soccer Team to 2 City Titles, Now He Battles the Debilitating Effects of Lou Gehrig’s Disease

Ask Bob Horn about the part he played in helping to found City Section girls’ soccer in 1988, or why the team he coached, Chatsworth High, has won every City championship, and watch his eyebrows.

That’s the only way Bob Horn can communicate. With his eyebrows.

Horn, 50, stricken since 1988 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease--has been unable to speak or voluntarily move any part of his body except his eyebrows for almost two years.

In the 1990-91 season--his second and last at the helm of the team--Horn coached from a wheelchair. Longtime friend Jack Sidwell served as an assistant as Chatsworth won its third consecutive City title. Coaching without Horn this season, Sidwell has led the top-seeded Chancellors (7-0) into the playoffs today against Bell.

Five years ago, Horn tirelessly lobbied City officials to start a girls’ soccer program, in part so his daughter, Laura, whom he had coached in soccer since she was 6, would have an opportunity to play high school soccer.

In 1988, his efforts paid off. The year before Laura entered Chatsworth, City girls’ soccer began.

Said Horn: “I was persistent and fairly obnoxious.”

Actually, he doesn’t say that. His wife, Judy, does. And it takes him more than three minutes to get that across to her.

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When Horn wants to communicate, he raises his eyebrows to Judy. She seems to sense it.

“Do you want to add something?” Judy asks.

He raises his eyebrows. The left one moves only slightly. The right arches more, maybe a quarter-inch.

“One, two, three,” Judy recites in a monotone, counting to seven, waiting for her husband to signal her.

She refers to a chart that consists of the alphabet neatly aligned in five rows of letters followed by two rows of five numerals. As Judy counts four, Bob arches his eyebrows.

The fourth row.

“P, Q, R, S . . .” Judy ticks off.

His eyebrow jumps.

“S.” She writes it down.

The first letter is out of the way. Time for the second.

“One, two, three . . .”

The couple, married for 27 years, have shortcuts. Often she will need only one or two letters to guess the word. Usually she is right. If not, the painstaking process continues.

For a man who has traveled the world, served as a Cal State Northridge political science professor for nearly a quarter-century, earned a Fulbright scholarship and acted as a consultant for Rand Corp., it has reached this point.

For Bob Horn, who spent his life sharing himself and his ideas with others, communication now comes one letter at a time.

“It is very frustrating,” he said. “I do better in writing than in person.”

Horn has a special computer program and sensor keyed to his eyebrows that enables him to use his computer. Despite the effort simple communication now requires, he writes a monthly newsletter for his church.

“I think the key to communication is to respect your audience,” he said. “And that hasn’t changed.”

But so much else has since he felt that first twinge in his upper left arm five years ago while riding his bicycle to work. It was the first symptom of the ordeal to come.

The twinges spread to his left leg. Doctors ruled out possible causes one by one. He traveled to Detroit in June, 1988, and the diagnosis was confirmed. ALS.

ALS poses few mysteries. The deterioration of the nerve cells that control muscular movement is well-documented and predictable. Motor control becomes increasingly difficult and then nonexistent. The abilities to speak and swallow are lost, and eventually the capacity to breathe. Every ALS sufferer knows the progression and the choice he must face--to be placed on a ventilator or die.

To choose the ventilator means a life of complete physical inaction, living with an active mind imprisoned in an unresponsive body. It is not an easy choice.

Bob Horn has always been a participant, living a life not only of action but of interaction.

A professor at CSUN for 22 years, he was no stodgy academician, whiling away his hours in solitary research.

He and George Brown, a fellow Northridge professor, put together a course in 1988 to illustrate Soviet-U.S relations. Simulating political leaders coping with international crises, Horn’s students took the position of the Soviet Politburo and Brown’s that of the National Security Council.

“It was a fun class that everyone got involved with,” said his former teaching assistant, Steve Hirsch. “He had a long list of people who wanted to get into his classes. He is one of those rare professors who really cared about his students.”

Horn introduced a model United Nations program at CSUN in 1972 that still exists and served as the program’s adviser for nearly 20 years. He often invited his students to his Canoga Park home for dinner.

“Unlike some teachers, I always liked my students,” Bob said.

Said Judy: “He believed in letting the kids get to know him better and the family better and letting them get to know each other on a personal level.”

An expert in international relations--particularly Soviet studies--Horn experienced what he taught.

He lived in Indonesia for a year working on his dissertation in 1966, and in Malaysia for a year in 1983 on the Fulbright scholarship. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1979 for an International Political Science Assn. conference. A world map on his living room wall has clusters of pins denoting places he has visited.

He was no accidental tourist.

“We never put much money into our house,” Judy said. “We used (the money) to travel.”

He might not have put all that much into his house, but he put everything into his home.

“I don’t know anyone who is a more model father,” said Kit Machado, fellow CSUN professor and friend of 20 years. “He is devoted to his kids and it shows.”

When his children played soccer, Horn rose at 5:30 a.m. every Saturday to set up goal posts at Winnetka Park with Sidwell, a league commissioner in the American Youth Soccer Organization. Horn was a deputy commissioner. In 1987 Horn formed the Valley United Wings club team.

Amy Hunter, a freshman on the UC Santa Barbara team, played for Horn on the Wings for three seasons.

“When I came to the team from a rival Simi Valley club, here I was, this new girl who knew maybe one person,” Hunter said. “He went out of his way to make me feel comfortable and safe. He’d work with you individually and if you had a bad practice or got annoyed at another coach, he’d call you at home and say, ‘Are you OK?’ He was like a father to all of us. Whenever he was around, it seemed like everything would be all right.”

Hunter lives in the UCSB dorms with Horn’s daughter, Laura. Three other friends and former Horn players--Heather Gorman, Kris Bassler, who also plays for the Gauchos, and Kim Costantino--attend UCSB.

The archetypal coaching father, Horn coached his three children on youth soccer teams since the oldest, Jeff, 23, was 6. Chris, 21, and Laura, 19, each started playing soccer when they turned 6 and Bob coached them in AYSO leagues at Winnetka Park.

He also coached his sons in Little League baseball, but Judy said: “Girls’ soccer was his main love.”

Jeff and Chris both played soccer for Chatsworth High. But as Laura neared high-school age, the lack of a girls’ soccer program hit home.

Horn went into action.

“He and others were active in getting L.A. Unified (School District) to approve a girls’ soccer program,” Judy said. “It was hard to believe there was no program. They had all sorts of excuses--no field space, no referees, no coaches. But whenever Bob could, he would talk to the Chatsworth principal. (Five) years ago, they finally approved it.”

It was not a one-man effort, but Horn was a prime mover.

“I feel he was responsible for getting City soccer to happen,” Sidwell said. “He wrote letters to the principal, made phone calls downtown, did a lot of work. I think (City girls’ soccer) still would have taken place (without Horn), but it would have been two or three years later.”

Horn took over the Chatsworth program in its second season, 1989-90, Laura’s first year. He asked Sidwell to assist him and Steve Berk, the Chatsworth faculty coach of record.

The Chancellors won the City title that year. And the next.

Hirsch, the teaching assistant, often would drive the ailing Horn from CSUN to soccer practice.

“He put just as much into soccer as he did into his work,” Hirsch said.

In Horn’s second season, his symptoms became more pronounced. He began to fall while standing on the sidelines and soon was forced to ride around in a motorized three-wheel cart he could operate with his hands. He lashed a Mikhail Gorbachev doll to the front of the vehicle and called it “The Gorbymobile.”

“That was fun,” Horn said.

“What? Mowing down people?” said Judy, laughing.

Horn used a bullhorn to amplify his failing voice, but his condition deteriorated rapidly.

“By the time the championship game came around (in January, 1991), he didn’t want anyone to see him,” Sidwell said. “He was looking pretty bad. He was down on the sidelines at Birmingham High, but he had his wheelchair facing away from the stands.”

He also had used his motorized wheelchair in the classroom. For a year, his CSUN students had picked him up at home and taken him to school so he could lecture, and many of them gathered in the hospital when Horn was in the intensive care unit for a month in February, 1991. The model United Nations continued.

Finally, unable to breathe or swallow, he opted to go on the ventilator at the end of February, 1991.

“He had been a participant all his life,” Judy said. “Now he went to being an observer, watching his kids graduate from school and play sports, that sort of thing.”

“The respirator isn’t great, but it beats the alternative,” Horn said.

The squat, blue metal box sits behind him on an end table. Horn sits in a nearby easy chair, looking every inch the professor, wearing a comfortable gray sweater, a shirt with a collar and a bemused, inquisitive gaze. A long plastic tube is affixed to his throat, methodically filling his lungs with air, breathing for him with the consistency of a metronome.

A gastrotomy tube--G-tube for short--is connected to Horn’s stomach, feeding him a nutrient formula and medicine, and he requires round-the-clock care. A voracious reader, he finishes a book every two days with the aid of an electronic page turner he controls with a headband that senses his eyebrow movement. A small soccer ball sticker adorns the headband.

Judy said he loves to go to bookstores and attend church every other week, though he cannot venture out of the house often.

Horn is kept up to date on the Chancellors’ progress this season by Sidwell. They are favored to win their fifth consecutive title, and Horn recently gave Sidwell a message for the playoffs.

“ ‘Don’t mess up and lose our first City championship,’ ” Sidwell said.

Chances are, they won’t.

The Chancellors’ closest match this season was a 4-0 victory over playoff-bound Granada Hills, and in seven matches, Chatsworth has outscored opponents, 54-3. The toughest match of the season? A 1-1 tie against the alumni in December. Horn wanted to attend but couldn’t because of cold weather.

There are plenty of things he no longer can do.

“But, compared to what I can’t do, I can do things that are important: like love, feel, think, communicate, read and write,” he said.

There is one other thing Horn can do. When someone incorrectly guesses a letter or word he is trying to say, his left eyebrow moves slightly downward and his lips, surrounded by a bushy salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, curve upward. His brown eyes sparkle.

Bob Horn smiles when he says no, as if forgiving the world for not being able to keep up with him.