Let’s Be Frank, They Were Meant to Be

It all started when she hurled a hot dog at the guy blocking kickoff

BY SUSAN BERGHEL SUKSTORF

ur story starts in the fourth row, on the 45-yard line of Memorial Stadium during the Nebraska-Oklahoma game on Nov. 21, 1987. It was the final game of the regular season. A battle for No. 1 in the country and an Orange Bowl berth. I was there to watch the game, but there was a large man with a sign emblazoned with the words to the Hail Varsity fight song blocking my view.

“Hey, down in front,” I yelled at the guy. What kind of a person blocks the view for kickoff?

Then I threw my hot dog at him so that he’d get the message. He did. And being a nice boy from Fremont, he not only put his sign down, he even offered to buy me a new hot dog. In exchange, I offered to cook a homemade chicken dinner.

Perry Sukstorf and I talked a bit during the game. Afterward I had plans with friends to celebrate our victory (sadly our Huskers lost 17-7) so I canceled those plans and I went with Perry to see the newly-released movie Flowers in the Attic. When I came home I told my roommates, “I met the man I am going to marry.” Somehow I just knew. He was a gentle giant. A kind and thoughtful farm boy. I was a city girl, and I was already hooked.

After our first date, we discovered that we lived in the same Harper-Schramm-Smith dorm complex, went to the same parties and had friends in common. But, somehow, we had never met.

One month later, I brought Perry home to Georgia to meet my parents. While I was born and raised in Atlanta, my parents were Husker alumni: Mary Louise Pittack (’57) and Robert John Berghel (’56).

Upon meeting Perry (a Nebraska native), my mother proceeded to quiz him about where he grew up. He explained his mother’s family was from Gresham, Nebraska, and that his mother’s maiden

My grandfather had been a Lutheran pastor in Lexington for many years. As it turned out our families had known each other well. My mother was in weddings that his family attended, and my grandfather was the pastor who married his grandparents, in the dining room of the parsonage.

There were so many connections. My mother and his mother’s cousins were good friends, and our grandparents knew each other. Three generations … but that isn’t the end of the story.

My mother was doing some family tree research and found out that Perry and my great-great-grandfathers Carl Heitman and Carl Gierhan were two of the seven founding members of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Gresham, Nebraska. Clearly we were meant to be together.

Perry and I were married in Atlanta on May 21, 1989. After Perry’s graduation, we never lived in Nebraska again.

We have three children, all born in Colorado, two of whom chose to traverse back to Lincoln to attend UNL. Our son, Christopher (’20), lived in the same dorm that Perry’s father and brother lived in. He was married in the University Chapel, the same church where my parents were married in 1957. Our daughter, Caroline, has made a lot of friends at Nebraska, one of whom is from Lexington. That friend laughs, because our daughter knows more about Lexington, and the people who live there, than the friend who is a resident of the town.

So that means our families have crossed paths for six generations … and counting. It was always meant to be.