It’s been more than 20 years since Rick Cornforth graduated from Viterbo, but memories of his college days recently came flooding back after a surprise discovery.

A La Crosse native who graduated from Logan High School, Cornforth completed work on his biology degree in 2001. He started his college journey at the University of Iowa, intent on becoming a dentist. Neither his father, Richard (known to most as Wayne), nor mother, Diane, had completed a college degree, and Cornforth’s path to earning his had a couple detours before he found himself at Viterbo.

Cornforth lost his mother in June 2021 and his father in September 2022. Last fall, after his father died, Cornforth had the wrenching duty of going through the things his parents had left behind. In a drawer, he found an undeveloped roll of film.

“I had no clue who had taken the pictures on that film, let alone how I could find out what was on it,” Cornforth said.

Kodak created its first digital camera in 1975, a toaster-sized unit produced two years before Cornforth was born. The start of the digital photography revolution, however, was just getting rolling when Cornforth was in college.

“Back in college, we used to use disposable cameras, and then rush them for development to see how they turned out,” Cornforth recalled. “We could have prints back in an hour.”

These days, of course, getting film developed takes a bit longer. Cornforth took the film to Walgreens for processing and discovered that it would take a month to get prints back. A couple weeks ago, the mystery of the undeveloped film was revealed.

“I was really surprised to see it was my film. I was expecting it to be my parents’,” Cornforth said.

When Cornforth got the prints, he was looking through a window on the past, seeing Viterbo classmates and other friends from high school gathered for a night of holiday celebration at Brothers in downtown La Crosse around Christmas 2001.

“You know, we all look a little bit younger,” Cornforth said with a laugh.

The quality of the photos was better than the usual disposable camera would produce: not too blurry, not too dark.

Cornforth posted 20 of the photos to his Facebook page, triggering a wave of nostalgia for him and his friends. He shared some of the new photos to go with this story, and he even dug into his stash of photos from his Viterbo days and picked out some to share.

While at Viterbo, Cornforth took part in two study abroad opportunities: a biology trip to Belize and a history class trip to Vienna, Austria. “Those were my first trips outside the country. I think there’s where I got my itch to travel,” said Cornforth, who has since become quite the globetrotter, with his many overseas destinations including Thailand, China, Australia, and India.

Cornforth did not pursue his plans to go into dentistry, but he calls upon his biology studies in his work for SOBI, an international pharmaceutical company that started in Sweden. He’s been with the company for 10 years, currently as an executive clinical account manager.

His work focuses on a monoclonal antibody treatment for RSV administered to pre-term infants who are particularly vulnerable to this respiratory disease, which has surged this year. The treatment is administered to the infants before they are released from neonatal care units to protect them from developing a life-threatening RSV infection.

“I help with the logistics between hospital and clinic and make sure the babies don’t fall through the cracks,” said Cornforth, who works with every NICU in Wisconsin. “A lot of it involves training nurses who dose the babies and working with new providers who haven’t used the treatment before.”

In addition to his life-saving work for SOBI, Cornforth has served his neighbors in Onalaska since 2016 as their elected representative on the La Crosse County Board of Supervisors, where he has helped lead an effort to address racism as a public health crisis.

“I really enjoy being on the board,” Cornforth said. “I never would have guessed I’d run for public office.”

His service in elective office, just like the film he found, goes to show it’s hard to predict sometimes how things might develop.

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