My friend Kim asked me a question about our college years. It wasn’t a casual question; it was one with purpose. She really wanted to understand how everything fits together.

What was it about our time at college that was so important to who we are today?

Most of us, whether we went to college or not, can look back on our early years of adulthood and see how certain events and particular people shaped us—and how their influence stays with us, even decades later.

Kim and I don’t see each other often, but we swap emails from time to time, and when we attend our college reunions, we make it a point to check in with each other. Kim also keeps up with me on Facebook and by reading the essays I publish online. In a recent email, Kim mentioned she had long wished I would write about our time together in college, at Transylvania University in Lexington. The lifelong impact of her college years had been on her mind.

“All of my important relationships came from Transy,” Kim said when we finally talked on the phone. “It’s where I met my husband. It’s where I found the people who are my best friends to this day. Transy gave me all that, and I don’t know how. What is it about Transy that gave us what we have today … who we are today?

I can’t answer big questions, so I asked Kim if I could narrow it down. She and I shared a group of friends and a memorable semester—the spring of 1980 at Transylvania University—so, would it be OK if I focused on those few months? Maybe I could find answers about that short time that she could apply to a lifetime.

She agreed and we started talking about that long-ago semester. After that, I reached out to the other people who were there with us.

The thing that started a fantastic group of friends was a relationship that ended. Kim returned to Transy in January 1980 after splitting up with her fiancé over Christmas break. The guy, also a Transy student, was in a fraternity, and Kim’s entire social life at college had revolved around that group. She was left, then, with some friends in her dorm. Kim was sorority sisters with Paula, who lived across the hall from her, and with Joanie, a few doors down. Their roommates, Debbie and Deb, were in a different sorority, but no matter. That group of five became Kim’s new network.

Transylvania didn’t have fraternity houses; the four fraternities at our small college each had a chapter room in the basement of the men’s dorm complex. Kim couldn’t go to the parties she used to attend—her ex-fiancé would be there—so her group started frequenting a different fraternity’s chapter room for their weekend entertainment. It was mine, of course.

Those girls were exceedingly cute, and my friends and I were … guys, so it’s not surprising that my buddies—John, Ted, Mac, Ren, and Mark—connected with Kim and her friends. We drank, we danced, we laughed. Not all of us all the time, but many of us most of the time.

Joanie remembered this origin story: “I think it was Paula’s interest in John that pulled us into your chapter room, and honestly, once we were there, we just genuinely liked you guys.”

What I’ve described so far is not unusual. More than half the students at Transylvania belonged to a Greek organization, and much of the campus’s socializing—for Greeks and independents alike—took place at fraternity parties every weekend. What was unusual was the strong bond our group formed. It was a time we all remember.

“I have great memories of all my years at Transy, but that one semester is the one I remember the most,” Kim said. “We were all outgoing, and we just had a big time. We were part of the disco era, and it was just a fun time.”

A song can transport you to the past, and the memories of our music still thump in our collective ears. When I asked, friends cited “Boogie Wonderland (Earth, Wind & Fire), Boz Scaggs, and songs from “Saturday Night Fever,” but the true soundtrack of the semester was Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album. Lyrics in the title track told the tale of our time together:

’Cause we’re the party people night and day
Livin’ crazy, that’s the only way

I’m certain we went to class; we all graduated, after all. I don’t recall the details of my academic days, but I remember a robust rotation of nighttime revelry: Green Lantern on Mondays (beer was sold in pint bottles), 803 South Broadway on Tuesdays (“quarter night” for draft beer), and a variety of other bars, dorm rooms, or an off-campus apartment the rest of the week, with chapter room parties on Friday or Saturday.

“You guys had senioritis,” Kim said. “You had a ‘throw it all to the wind’ attitude that semester.”

I’m not proud of the drinking I did, and alcohol plays a role in our diminished and fragmented memories. That and time: nearly five decades now.

Every friend I spoke or corresponded with cited their failing memory as a disclaimer, and in fact, many of the snippets they gave me don’t match. Other memories got muddled with similar experiences. Spring break, 1980, is a prime example.

I gathered recollections of that Florida trip from seven members of the group and, with mine, ended up with eight different stories. We agree that groups of us went to different coasts: The girls (plus Bonita), Ted, and Mac all went to Pompano Beach on the Atlantic side. John, Ren, Mark, and I went to Naples on the gulf side. Kim and her hometown friend, Teresa, had to fly home midweek when Teresa’s dad suffered a heart attack. The rest of the East Coast crew, though, journeyed west and rendezvoused with my group.

The vehicle that transported us to Naples’s only disco was the one the girls had driven from campus: a conversion van that Paula’s dad entrusted to her. It was during spring break that, because of the affection we had for each other, we started calling our ride the Love Van. Or maybe it was prior to Florida, when Paula had the van on campus in preparation for spring break. Or maybe it was named after spring break. It’s one of many messy memories.

Asking old friends to examine the distant past has taught me something: Memory doesn’t preserve facts—it preserves feelings. What people remember most clearly isn’t always what happened exactly. We preserve the sense of a moment, but not necessarily the details that framed it.

Joanie put it this way: “Accurate dates, times, and places have dimmed, but the way I feel about all of you will never be dim,” she said. “I can’t pinpoint the exact moment we became ‘us,’ but I’m pretty sure it happened because we were all just live‑out‑loud fun, and it felt natural to fall into step together.”

I should speak to the nature of our relationships. After all, with all this talk about young people and “livin’ crazy” and a Love Van … you must be curious about just how friendly we were.

There was romance, for sure. Two couples started dating relationships that lasted for several months, and sparks flew here and there among the rest of us. While we might have occasionally slept in beds together, that’s (mostly) what it was—sleeping in proximity to one another.

“This is when I learned about platonic relationships,” Kim said. “We didn’t have romantic connections, and we all just stayed together.”

John described it this way: “At the end of the day, we were all gentlemen trying to do the right thing. There really were no egos, and we all had each other’s backs.”

Inside the Love Van, then, was something else that Michael Jackson sang about in the best song on that album:

Lovely is the feeling now
I won’t be complaining
The force is … love power
Keep on, with the force, don’t stop
Don’t stop ’til you get enough

By understanding more about the lifelong friends Kim gained at college, we’re getting to the heart of her question. But how did those friends literally shape her life—my life, too … and all our lives?

I’m convinced it wasn’t only the who, but it was also the when that impacted us so profoundly. I know from reading and from experience that college students can experience enormous changes in their lives when they move from their parents’ home to a college campus. And at that age, when an inner circle of friends forms in a closed living environment, the bonding is intensified.

“Transy was home away from home for all of us,” Debbie said. “A campus that small allowed us to eat together, walk to class together, party together, and vacation together.”

College was, for me, a time to shape and refine my identity as I moved toward adulthood, and the bonds I developed in my final semester at Transy played a key role. It was the same for Joanie. “Those friendships were formed at a time when we were all growing into who we would become,” she said, “and they’ve stayed with me ever since.”

One memory stands out. I was a psychology major in an informal pre-law program, and as the semester drew to a close, I was lucky to be accepted into the University of Kentucky Law School. To celebrate, the Love Van girls put together a party that was as bizarre as its name.

“Bob’s Pre-Love Formal,” Kim remembered. “We had T-shirts made, and we got rooms at the Embers Inn on New Circle Road. It was the sleaziest place we could find.”

This party exemplifies what I said earlier: Emotions preserve the sense of a moment if not the details. All of us are fuzzy on exactly what transpired—Joanie termed it legendary—but what I hold on to is the feeling I had that weekend. My name was on the T-shirt, but we weren’t really celebrating me … we were celebrating us. The us we had become.

I graduated in June 1980, along with John and Mac. The others remained at Transy to finish their degrees, but the Love Van crew didn’t roll together again.

“I remember so clearly how everything changed after you all graduated,” Joanie said. “The spark on campus dimmed, and life suddenly felt a little more serious.”

Kim told me that nothing pushed us apart; we all just drifted away from each other. But in the years since 1980, Kim and the girls—often joined by Gina—have gathered many times, either at someone’s house or at a beach somewhere. And more recently, Kim also joined an insanely active friend group with an entirely different set of Transy alums—people she didn’t know well at all when she was in college.

My group of guys vacationed together for a while, but then family and work intervened, and our get-togethers now are typically confined to a night out during Derby week. I’ve seen the Love Van girls only a handful of times over the years. We did come together during a Transy reunion in 2022, and though our conversation was brief, the photo (top) is epic. As you look at that picture, sing these lines from Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You”:

And when the groove is dead and gone
You know that love survives
So we can rock forever

The notion of “forever” brings me back down to Earth … and the reason I pulled this piece together. I write this for my friend Kim, who needed to understand how past and present fit together: What is it about Transy that gave us what we have today … who we are today?

My only answer is that, in the spring of 1980, we somehow found each other. And when we did, we each found ourselves.

That’s how it fits together. Who we became then is who we are today.