Dante Loretta

I was like, no, I think I got it figured out.

I was able to sleep on the floor of some friends' houses until I found a place to live.

So that was kind of really self-sufficient.

I don't have a lot of photos from this time, but I think these three kind of capture a lot of what my college was about.

So this one's one of my favorites.

AP mentioned that I was an American cultural counselor to students coming from Japan to study English for a couple of months here.

And that was a great job.

First of all, the students were just wonderful, very warm people that we made lifelong friendships with.

And my job was to show them what life was like as a U of A college student in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

So it was a pretty good time to be here at the U of A. So they made this shirt for me.

Those of you who speak Japanese recognize this is kind of my name.

You know, you have to bend the rule a little bit.

but that actually does say Dante, and it means warm hand, which they thought the warm kanji was particularly applicable to our relationship and to my personality at the time, so they thought that was really great.

One of the other things I did was own a 72 Volkswagen bus,

and showing them American cultural life.

We packed up and hit the road to go tour with the Grateful Dead during the summers, which was kind of the thing to do back then.

It was a wonderful era if you were a deadhead.

Some of my favorite shows come from that period of time.

So we really became great friends and went on great adventures all around the American West.

Did lots of camping, lots of hiking, backpacking, that kind of thing.