Therapeutic Riding Centers Profiled

Founders of One of Largest Therapeutic Riding Centers Profiled
California -- The Santa Rosa Press Democrat carried a story on August 27, 2000 by Meg McConahey about the funders of Giant Steps, a large therapeutic riding facility:

Two refugees from Silicon Valley found the satisfaction of a lifetime when they created one of the nation's largest therapeutic riding programs on a ranch near Petaluma:

Robert Pope, Lee Justice

* Ages: 62 and 46

* Achievements: Founders of Giant Steps, one of the country's largest therapeutic riding programs for the disabled, based at their Walking Horse Ranch in Petaluma.

* Background: Pope had a large property management company and later was a real estate consultant for high-tech companies before winding up as manager of the ill-fated Shoreline Golf Links in Mountain View.

Justice for years did international marketing for a telecom company.

Benefit performance

* What: Jazz greats Cleo Laine and John Dankworth appear at a benefit dinner and performance for Giant Steps Therapeutic Equestrian Center.

* Where: Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park.

* When: Begins with reception, 5:30 p.m. Sept. 9

* Tickets: $100-$300

* Information: 769-8900

* Quotable:

"We put it together and helped to make it happen. But something spiritual or magical takes place on top of that. I'd love to sit here and say we visualized all this and it happened. But we didn't have a clue."

-- Robert Pope

A gentle face nudges up against Robert Pope, and he bends down to eye level with the animal, blowing lightly in her nostrils.

"Hah. What do you think?" he asks, expecting a reaction, if not a verbal reply. Rhapsody in Blue, or Winnie for short, flinches at the gesture and Pope offers an apology. "Is that too hard?" he clucks, then blows again, more softly this time.

To anyone unschooled in horse communication, it would appear to be an odd gesture. But Pope explains, "You blow in their nostrils. That's how they greet each other. It's how they get a sense for you."

This walkabout at Walking Horse Ranch -- the affectionate greeting of each member of his equine "staff" with a passing "Hello, Sweetie" or a caress of the neck -- is a daily ritual for Pope and his wife, Lee Justice, who in only four years have built up one of the largest therapeutic riding programs in the country on their 23-acre Petaluma ranch.

Every week some 45 children and adults aged 5 to 75 with disabilities as diverse as Down's syndrome, Tourette syndrome, blindness, cancer, cerebral palsy, autism, emotional impairment, spinal injury and terminal illnesses, take "Giant Steps" toward building their physical strength, balance and self-esteem on the backs of the ranch's smooth-gaited Tennessee walking horses.

"It's a tremendous satisfaction," says Pope, "that we're able to facilitate a positive change in people's lives, however incremental that is going to be."

Giant Steps has brought about just as profound a change in the lives of Pope and Justice. Less than 10 years ago, they were both moving at DSL speeds in Silicon Valley. Pope was a real estate consultant for high-tech companies and later manager of a major golf course in Mountain View. Justice did marketing for a large telecom company. Both spent far more time riding in jets to overseas business meetings than riding horses.

Seven years ago, however, they fled the South Bay's stifling crowds, traffic and "attitude" for a remote ranch in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana.

Inspired to launch new career

It proved a short-lived retirement. Through a Montana woman who was a U.S. pioneer in therapeutic riding, they were inspired to launch a new career together, incorporating their beloved Tennessee walking horses -- specially bred for a gentle ride -- with their desire to apply their skills and energy to more meaningful work than simply making money.

"Probably the biggest thrill," says Pope, "is to see people after they've been riding three years and what they can do. They're just so different."

Take Michael. Born with serious developmental disabilities, the 44- year-old man uttered his first word ever while riding at Giant Steps. Appropriately, the word was "horse." He hasn't stopped talking since, adding to his vocabulary every day and increasing his ability to communicate.

On a sunny August afternoon Sue Hurst of Santa Rosa sits on risers, watching her 10-year-old daughter Callie, blind and hearing impaired, negotiate her horse around the arena. After two years of weekly classes, she said, Callie's balance has improved tremendously and her confidence has soared.

"In her mind, this is not like physical therapy," Hurst said. "This is something she loves."

Pope says there's an inexplicable alchemy of will, hard work and serendipity that takes place six days a week in the ranch's arena, equipped with adapted mounting blocks and ramps and serenely situated within a ring of oaks at the foot of Petaluma's western hills.

"This thing is far more profound than anything we ever imagined," marvels Pope from the cramped, century-old cottage crammed with photos of happy, helmeted riders that serves as the business offices of Giant Steps.

More than pony rides

Drawing on years of business experience and a strong network of contacts, the couple set out to mount a professional program and board of directors -- including the dean of the University of San Francisco business school, an orthopedic surgeon, a Washington, D.C., attorney and a bank president -- that offered more than Saturday pony rides to a couple of kids on old donated mares ready to be put out to pasture.

"This not just a feel-good thing where people can recreate and ride horses," Pope explains. "While there is that aspect to it, every single rider is evaluated and a program is designed for that person's needs and for their disability. There has to be an added value in a therapeutic sense."

Giant Steps now has a five-person staff, including Pope and Justice, more than 130 volunteers, 42 horses, and a budget of $365,000 a year.

Origins in Great Britain

The concept of using horses in physical therapy was developed in Great Britain as a way of rehabilitating disabled World War II veterans. It's based on the idea that the gentle, rhythmic motion of the horse stimulates the body and works the muscles of the rider in a manner similar to the human stride. It's also been shown to enhance flexibility and head, eye and hand coordination, according to Dr. Robert Gilbert, an orthopedic surgeon and member of the Giant Steps board of directors.

Giant Steps has attracted other high-level supporters, who are drawn to the couple's passion and the tangible results of the program. The first to join the board were actors Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, who also fled north for a slower-paced life in Marin. Justice was introduced to the former "L.A. Law" stars through her Pilates exercise instructor in San Rafael, who figured that as mutual horse lovers, the women would have something in common.

"We always believed what Will Rogers is supposed to have said, that 'the best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse,"' says Eikenberry, who discovered the therapeutic benefits of riding after recovering from breast cancer in 1986.

"It's such a way to get centered and have a greater sense of myself and be in my body and to be connected with such a magnificent creature," she said. "Everyone should do it, most especially people who have trouble thinking of their body as a friend because it has betrayed them in one way or another."

Last year Eikenberry and Tucker did a benefit performance of A.J. Gurney's "Love Letters" at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park, raising $78,000 for the still-financially struggling program, which Pope and Justice have heavily subsidized out of their own retirement money. This year Pope persuaded jazz legend and part- time Sonoma resident Cleo Laine and her husband, John Dankworth, to do another benefit, Sept. 9, at Spreckels.

Sales knowledge, nerve helps

Pope acknowledges that a lot of people have marveled at Giant Steps' way of attracting celebrities to a still-fledgling organization. But it's not, he maintains, who he knows or simply luck. The key, he says, is knowing how to sell the program -- and being brazen enough to ask.

A singer and musician himself, Pope was in a local studio recording one of his own songs to serve as background music for a promotional video of Giant Steps when he ran into two musicians who, he learned, tour with Laine.

"I'm a huge fan. I've loved her from the first time I saw her," said the onetime folk singer and jazz lover. Seeing his opportunity, he asked them to hand-deliver a letter to Laine. A year later it led to a backstage meeting at Yoshi's in Oakland.

Pope relates the story as he makes plans, by phone, to meet singer Maureen McGovern backstage at a club in the Bay Area that night. Already he is thinking ahead to next year.

But Pope, who at 62 has the boyish enthusiasm of a man half his age, also has an easy way of winning over people.

"He's smart, he's compassionate and he's got a great sense of humor," said Turner Madden, a Washington, D.C., attorney specializing in disabled access issues, who also is a cousin by marriage and a member of the board.

"He loves to play music. We were at his black-tie affair one time back East and everyone was leaving. But there was this big piano and he just sat down and serenaded us for another two hours. He's really an entertainer."

Pope's call to social service on horseback began back when he was a teen-ager growing up Irish-Catholic in urban San Francisco in the 1950s. He'd rent horses down in Pacifica -- "the kind you don't know whether to shoot or to ride" -- and volunteered summers at Catholic Youth Organization camps for troubled kids, where he rode whenever he got the chance.

Inspired by the young seminarians he got to know at the camps, he dropped out of USF at 20 to enroll in the diocesan seminary in Menlo Park, where Bishop Dan Walsh of the Diocese of Santa Rosa was a classmate.

"I think now it was a last-ditch attempt to please parents who I couldn't please any other way," he reflects. "The day I said I was going in, my mother started crocheting the tablecloth for my ordination."

He lasted only a year. "It (the seminary) was right next to Menlo- Atherton High School and I'd stand there with this Roman collar and cassock on watching these girls go back and forth in their convertibles. I thought, 'What's wrong with this picture?"'

From seminary to Army

Pope did a stint in the Army, then returned to USF, but dropped out again short of a degree to take up folk singing, unfortunately just as rock 'n' roll was displacing it. But he did fall into a job with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, finding new homes for the poor displaced by the rejuvenation of South of Market.

Next to Giant Steps, says Pope, it was the best job he ever had, enabling him to work one-on-one with people and directly improve their lives.

One of his tasks was to encourage nonprofit groups to build subsidized housing for the elderly. Later, figuring the best way to make sure all the newly built projects in which he had placed so many people didn't degenerate into slums, he formed a property management partnership that eventually landed major office building and shopping center contracts all over the state.

In 1979 Pope moved into real estate consulting, helping Silicon Valley clients such as Hewlett-Packard, Stanford University and Tandem Computers, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in L.A., with strategic space planning and site selection.

His dream of developing the first executive conference center on the West Coast, however, degenerated into a nightmare when he found himself entangled in an ugly and expensive legal battle.

Pope and a group of partners had leased property from the city of Mountain View next to the Shoreline Amphitheater. It proved to be unstable landfill and after the Loma Prieta earthquake, no lenders would finance the project. The partnership collapsed and Pope, who far prefers fly-fishing to golf, found himself with a long-term lease on the Shoreline Links, a course fraught with problems the city allegedly covered up and failed to correct.

Pope sued in federal bankruptcy court, alleging among other things that the course was an engineering disaster, built on a landfill leaking methane gas.

By this time the divorced father of three grown kids had met Justice, who was doing Far East marketing for Rolm Telecommunications. The newlyweds became partners in a draining five- year fight that left them dispirited and spent by the end.

Pope was consumed by the case, working on it day and night. Justice, who had developed a strong independence and an I-can-do-it- myself attitude growing up poor in a single-parent household in northern Virginia, did a lot of the legal paperwork.

Victory at a price

They eventually won the suit. But rather than suffering further while the decision was under appeal, they settled -- against their attorney's advice -- and took their $2 million share to buy a retreat in Montana. It was there they became acquainted with the beautiful Tennessee walking horses that proved the ideal mounts for therapeutic riding.

"The lawsuit was a wake-up call," says Pope. "If we had continued on with the appeal I would probably be running a golf course in Silicon Valley and we'd be living in a big house in Atherton we didn't need. We wouldn't have any of this, we would not really be liking our life, but we would not really be knowing how to get out of it. It was a decision about whether to continue and be in conflict or choose quality of life over money."

But living a leisurely life collecting and riding horses left the couple with, as Pope recalls, "a nagging feeling" of "What next?" and "surely we were intended to do more."

Unexpectedly, it was their stockbroker who, in casual conversation, introduced them to 82-year-old therapeutic riding pioneer Marge Kittredge. And that led them to take a giant leap, selling the Montana ranch and reinvesting in property in Petaluma.

Pope cuts the figure of an urbane cowboy, with a pin-striped Western shirt and handmade Ariat boots he finds more comfortable for riding. His salt-and-pepper hair is hidden under not a cowboy hat but a baseball cap, advertising Giant Steps. The cap is one way of piquing the curiosity of acquaintances and strangers, creating an opening to talk up Giant Steps.

So far, he and Justice have poured a half-million dollars of their retirement money in the form of donations and loans into the program, building fences, barns, bridges, a round pen for training horses and an arena for lessons, as well as donating their skills to running the program and raising funds to keep it going. All the infrastructure has been donated to the nonprofit Giant Steps.

The personal financial drain and the demands of not only maintaining but building up the program so it can serve more people, sometimes keeps him awake at night.

"We're not two wealthy people who have this toy and unlimited funds to play with," sighs Pope. "The program has to stand on its own."

By strategically courting empathetic board members of corporations and foundations they know will be open to their cause, Pope and Justice have managed to build up a first-class program, one of only 16 out of some 600 therapeutic riding programs in the country that are accredited by the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association.

"Bob likes to do things in a first-class way and he wanted to get Giant Steps off and running by doing things right. And that is unlike a lot of social service organizations that would be more apt to do only what they're able to afford," said Bill Reid, the president of Mechanics Bank and a member of the board.

Now Justice and Pope face the challenge of making the program self- supporting while carrying it to another level, they hope with a paid executive director, more volunteers and a covered arena so lessons can go on uninterrupted by bad weather.

Shows too time-consuming

For several years they helped promote the program by riding the show circuit with their stately horses, walking away with a room full of rosettes. But that, said Justice, who also is a Giant Steps instructor, was taking away too much from the daily work.

Sundays they take for themselves, to ride the low hills of the Sonoma/Marin border. Most of their time, however, is consumed by their work. Pope is already contemplating how they can possibly get away to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary next year.

Nonetheless, the long hours in this shared career, Justice said, bring far deeper rewards measured in small but significant accomplishments.

"It's so rewarding, even on the days when it's so hard," she said. "Today one of the men who rode has cerebral palsy. He's been here four times now and every week he rides longer. Today he rode 34 minutes and he's getting stronger and so responsive to what's happening. It just brings my Thursdays to a high." Robert Pope,