If you ask Rick Horn why he became a Shriner more than 20 years ago, he’ll talk about fellowship and getting to help others.
Especially when he gets to meet youngsters like Owen Mahan.
Horn, who lives in Colony, has served in an assortment of leadership positions within the Shriners organization, most recently as a potentate and now an ambassador.
It’s how he crossed paths with Mahan, 17, at a PGA golf tournament a few years back in Las Vegas.
“You can’t help but be inspired by Owen,” Horn said this week, after the pair returned from their most recent adventure, traveling to Phoenix for a NASCAR race, the Shriner’s Children’s 500.
Owen is set to return back to his home in Indiana this weekend, but not before the pair also took in some Big 12 Basketball Tournament action in Kansas City.
They’ll reunite again over the summer when Owen returns to the Sunflower State as an ambassador for the Kansas Shrine Bowl All-Star High School Football Game.
From there, they’ll attend a Shriners event in Atlanta, and get in plenty of fishing — Owen’s favorite activity — in between.
Sharing adventures is just one of the ways the duo has bonded. Perhaps it’s the way both are eternally optimistic, eager to share a smile and a hearty handshake with anyone and everyone.
Strangers are just friends they haven’t met yet.
OWEN’S story is one that should be filled with heartbreak, but certainly hasn’t dimmed the disposition of the eternally optimistic teenager.
He was 2 years old when his mother dropped him in a tub of scalding hot water, and for some unknown reason, didn’t seek medical treatment for more than two hours afterward.
By the time young Owen was taken to the hospital, he had second- and third-degree burns over 98% of his body.
He was immediately flown from the Lawrence hospital to a Children’s Shriners Hospital burn center in Galveston, Texas, where few expected him to survive.
But he did, undergoing scores of skin graft surgeries through the years.
