It should be no surprise that an important building on the campus of California State University at Long Beach will be named for Steve Horn. But naming it for both Steve and Nini Horn is a delight.
And appropriate. Mrs. Stephen Horn has been such an integral part of the life and career of the former congressman and former university president that one name without the other seems somehow incomplete.

The university and the community will pay tribute to the Horns at a ceremony Wednesday, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., when the North Campus Center, which houses the University Art Museum, will be rededicated as the Steve and Nini Horn Center. The building houses the University Art Museum, which Steve Horn founded and Nini Horn loves.

Horn has had several careers, all of them distinguished. He was a staff member for Labor Secretary James Mitchell in the Eisenhower administration and worked on major pieces of legislation as a chief aide to Republican Sen. Thomas Kuchel; he served as dean of graduate studies and research at American University; served as president of Long Beach State from 1970 to 1988; and was a member of Congress from 1992 until last year, when self-serving politicians gerrymandered him out of office.

Horn is a moderate Republican, whose political hero was Hiram Johnson, the California governor who took on the powerful railroads and other special interests in the early 1900s. He is a gentle, affable person whose sentences tend to run to 1,500 words because he knows so much about almost anything. What he's not is a pussycat, as recalcitrant faculty members and administrators learned when he set out years ago to turn a sleepy Long Beach State into a first- rate university.

In Congress he was a fighter as well, for issues he believed in, whether his party agreed or not, and for ordinary constituents as well as for the big issues. No member of Congress knew Congress as well as Steve Horn; none answered their own office phones late at night; and none more diligently looked after the interests of people back home whom nobody else seemed interested in helping.

These days, at Long Beach State, no one is more popular on campus than the current president, the enthusiastic and energetic Robert Maxson. And no one is quicker to praise the accomplishments of his predecessor, Steve Horn.

The ceremony Wednesday will give Maxson, and the community, a fitting way to express their appreciation. To both Horns.