I was prepared to dislike Steve Horn. I was a serious college newspaper editor, by gosh, and he was president of Long Beach State University, and that is the natural order of things. Student newspaper/school president: mongoose/cobra.

I arranged an interview with him in the fall of 1975, when I was editor of The Forty-Niner, and I can’t recall if I arrived with an agenda broader than “You’ll see I’m not scared of you!” I mean, I was generically too polite to be overtly combative/provocative, but I would ask The Tough Questions and come out of there, I’m sure I believed, having ticked him off and being proud of it, in that student journalist sort of way.

Thus, I was surprised that I found myyoungself liking Steve Horn, empathizing with how difficult it is to run a university was then, now and forever, and thinking, “Oh, that’s too bad” when I saw that Steve Horn died today, because he was one of those rarities in public life — a smart guy who actually tried to do the right thing and took seriously the “public service” concept.

I’m doing a lot of this from memory, but my recollection, as a native of Long Beach, is that anti-war protests were fairly common events at Long Beach State in 1970, when Horn was appointed president of the school that even then had more than 20,000 students. His predecessor may have been forced out (or escaped) because of the hassle of dealing with all the turmoil.

Anyway, during my days at Long Beach State, it was held as gospel that Steve Horn was a fascist, a war-monger, a Nixon apologist, or whatever other stupid things uninformed but know-it-all students hurl at people who happen to be in charge of a big school. The administrators who would prefer to see actual, you know, teaching and learning go on.

The man I talked to was so far from being a monstrous autocrat that it makes me laugh to remember it. His post-Long Beach State congressional career seemed to bear it out. He was extremely intelligent (I knew even then) and not at all condescending. And, in fact, looking back, I might even put him in the same category as John Wooden and Chuck Knox as capable and competent men who left a lasting impression on me after I interviewed them.

Politically, Horn was one of those “moderate Republicans” who are pretty much gone now but existed in some numbers into the middle 1960s, certainly. Rockefeller Republicans, they sometimes were called, and I was not in the least surprised to discover on his wiki page that he had worked for Thomas Kuchel, a Republican senator from California who was considered too squishy by the Goldwater faction of the party and lost in a primary to, I want to say, Max Rafferty, who was a goofball … or that Horn was an important figure in Rockefeller’s campaign in the California primary of 1964.

What is/was a moderate Republican? Someone who believes in small business and fiscal responsibility but is willing to go along with X amount of social change, just as long as it isn’t rocketing out of control. Guys who work inside the system, know how it works, have made it their business to know how it works and don’t apologize for it but also don’t become egomaniacs or demagogues.

That was Steve Horn, and that it what I got from him during my interview, way back when. I walked out of his office thinking “his job is harder than it looks” which was a sort of life lesson that I suppose college is supposed to be about. There is what we want right now and then there is what actually might be possible. The art of the possible; does anyone believe in that anymore?

I never spent any other significant time with Steve Horn. I soon moved out of the area and never had a chance to vote for him, though I certainly would have. But I like to think I knew, when I walked out of his office up there on the hill at Long Beach State, that he was a good and supremely capable man who was doing his level best to improve the lives of the people around him.

The country used to have quite a few people like that. It hardly does anymore, and now it has one less with Steve Horn gone.