Lori (Labombard) '94 and Richard '93 Sandberg

I was a freshman coming from a very small town at the border of the Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. I knew no one on campus and so on the first day of my Calculus class when a boy noticed that I looked like I had a handle on the subject (having had the class in high school) and asked if I might like to come tutor him and some of his friends so I said, “sure.”

It was an ostentatious beginning, as I arrived to the Bergstroms to find my future husband in the top loft with a thesaurus in hand finding colorful words to describe me and my gender. He didn’t impress much that night, but many of the others in the room were interesting and they all did this thing called roleplay with a game called Star Wars. My husband’s roommate said he’d let me play the Jedi so I kept coming back, some days to work problems with Calculus, but more often to figure out why they rolled dice for initiative.

I found out the group was sizeable and when they weren’t rolling dice or in class they were down in the PIT playing Sheepshead to the point that very few others got to sit on the couches Carroll had down there because we were always rotating a group in. That boy with the thesaurus, though, gradually began to redeem himself.

First with his blanket when I sat shivering, and then staying with me at the movies and getting me home when I’d been left by another. He became my ride home to the UP on breaks even though his home was two hours away. Four years later he gave me a ring but didn’t propose.