Professor Sanford Cary Couch served in the Navy on the USS Essex during the Korean War. After struggling to learn Russian, Professor Couch mastered the language and came to ASU in 1962, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

He was the primary designer of ASU's Russian language program and initiated most of the resulting courses. As a specialist in foreign language pedagogy, he authored six of ASU's Russian program texts and most of the Russian language lab resources. He led the program through its accreditation process, allowing ASU to grant its first Russian language bachelor's degree in 1965.

Sandy became an activist teacher of the Russian language, earning great regard from his thousands of students for his passionate and creative teaching methods. Over many decades, Professor Couch served as a primary leader of teacher and student exchange programs with the Soviet Union beginning in 1962 when, as Professor Couch often quipped, "Stalin still lay with Lenin." In these efforts, he traveled extensively throughout the USSR. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, Professor Couch continued his work for almost two more decades, establishing exchange programs in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, and serving as a cofounder of one of the first independent universities in Kazakhstan.

Professor Couch continued his missions through his eighties, logging more than seventy major delegation trips to the region during his career. He was the only U.S. academician to serve as resident director of both the IREX exchange program and the CIEE study-abroad program in the Soviet UnionSandy served as the National Executive-Secretary of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages as well as of the National Slavic Honor Society. He served as a curriculum advisor to the Ukraine Minister of Education, and as senior advisor to the first Minister of Higher Education for the Republic of Kazakhstan.

He also conducted a prison ministry to assist prisoners to build their paths to success on their release. 

Professor Couch is survived by his sister, his son and daughter-in-law, his daughter and son-in-law, five grandchildren and four great grandchildren.