They arrived at the University of Illinois as strangers but left as best friends.

Brought together in Allen Hall during an exciting, pivotal time in their lives, Callye Gibbons, Julie Kuhn, Denise Perry, Jeanne Steinbrenner and Laura Warfel started college in the fall of 1972.

More than five decades later, their remarkable friendship and tight-knit bond remains strong.

Last summer, they returned to the university for what Warfel called a “dream campus tour.” 

The tour included a stop in the residence hall where they lived – and their setting for a transformative period of self-discovery.

They recently came together again via Zoom to talk about their reunion and reminisce about life in Allen Hall, sharing a lot of laughs and offering some sage advice for current and future Illinois students.

Connecting on Campus

Gibbons remembers meeting new people and living in a residence hall as an exciting and eye-opening experience.

“The beauty of Allen Hall and the beauty of dorm living and random roommates is that it opens your world incredibly to a lot of different people,” Gibbons said. “It’s a treasure but also a helpful thing as you live. I don’t think you really know about yourself as well until you are out and independent from your family.”

Although they all ended up living on the same floor of Allen Hall, it took a couple of room changes to bring the five friends together. But more than anything else, it was their proximity to one another that helped spark their friendship.

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From left to right: Denise Perry, Julie (Bagans) Kuhn, Laura (Wasson) Warfel, Callye (Hunt) Gibbons and Jeanne (Wittenauer) Steinbrenner.

“We all had our separate class activities and other activities on campus,” Warfel said, “but our dorm life drew us all together and bonded us. We were, I think we all would say, more bonded with the people that we lived with than the people we saw in our classes.”

Steinbrenner agreed, saying “it’s hard not to” form a bond with the people you’re living around in a residence hall.

“I mean you’re there for every crisis,” she said. “It’s such a turbulent time of your life where lots does happen. You’re in the bathroom crying, and you end up talking to somebody for an hour. Everything happens, and you’re all right there together, and you all share it.”

Steinbrenner said she “loved the communal bathroom,” because it led to so many random, but sometimes significant interactions and brought people closer together. 

“We were right on top of each other, and it would be hard not to share who you are,” she said.

The longtime friends agreed that their years in residence halls were an important time of personal growth.

“I know for many of us, this was the first time we were away from our parents,” Warfel said. “We were figuring out life on our own agenda and our own path we were going to follow. This is the beginning of that.”

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Clockwise from the top left: Jeanne Steinbrenner; Callye Gibbons and Julie Kuhn; Gibbons; and Denise Perry.

The vibe in Allen Hall was very open and friendly, making it easy to develop relationships with the people who lived around them.

They recalled the hall’s lounges and common spaces as being popular places to hang out. At the time, students didn’t have televisions and computers in their rooms, so they often gathered together in lounges to watch popular soap operas and major news events.

Many of the safety concerns and protocols that exist now weren’t a thing in the 1970s, and these longtime friends recalled Allen Hall as a place where residents often kept their doors open during waking hours, which led to a lot of spontaneous conversations and social interactions.

Warfel said the room she shared with Gibbons was the first room people would pass on their way to and from the dining hall.

“Everybody would make a stop in our room for either five minutes or five hours,” she said. “That was always fun to just talk with everybody as they would stop by in the evenings.”

They also recalled many of the activities and events held for residents, including a memorable Halloween party as well as a talent show that Perry and Kuhn participated in.

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Clockwise from the top left: Laura Warfel on Halloween; Warfel; Jeanne Stenbrenner and Callye Gibbons; and Julie Kuhn in her Marching Illini uniform.

Living and Learning, Building a Community

Some of those activities were held in conjunction with the newly-launched Unit One, which Warfel said was then referred to as a “living and learning experience.” 

More than five decades later, Unit One is still thriving as one of 10 living-learning communities in Illinois residence halls.

“Unit One is really what brought us all together,” Warfel said. “We were in the first Unit One – the first year. From my perspective, they worked really hard to get people from lots of different majors, lots of different locations, bring them all together and then see if it works or not!”

Gibbons said there were a number of benefits to being part of Unit One.

“The ability to study independent ideas and classes with professors when we were just freshmen ... exploring our own interests and creative efforts, I mean, that was really awesome,” she said.

One aspect of Unit One they loved was the artists-in-residence program.

Kuhn said she’ll never forget seeing jazz musician Chick Corea eating in the dining hall and being “five feet away from him when he played piano.”

The group of longtime friends believe the Unit One application requirement helped bring interesting groups of students together, because they all really wanted to be there.

Allen Hall was also unique at the time as the only coed residence hall on campus.

“That was pretty crazy for all of our parents!” Warfel said.

Perry drew a laugh from the group, saying, “I don’t think I ever told my parents about that!”

Friends for Life

Steinbrenner said their group of friends is forever connected by generational things specific to the early ‘70s.

Within the group, they had other overlapping interests. They all had faith as part of their background, but now each was on her own faith journey. Warfel called music “a big connector” for her with Kuhn and Steinbrenner. Perry remembered “discovering” singer-songwriter Harry Chapin with Kuhn, and they were both in the Marching Illini. 

Despite these shared interests, Kuhn believes the group’s decades-long friendship probably wouldn’t have happened if they’d come together in a different time and place.

“I don’t think, had the five of us met somewhere different, I don’t think any of this would have happened,” Kuhn said. “I don’t think there’s enough in common outside of our history, but thankfully, we did [meet in Allen Hall]. We’re all very different people.”

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Clockwise from top left: Callye Gibbons; Julie Kuhn; and Denise Perry and Gibbons.

After two years in Allen Hall, Gibbons moved to Arkansas with her family and transferred to a college there. The rest of the group shared an apartment, relying on Perry’s car to help them explore Champaign-Urbana.

“Anything we saw of town was compliments of Denise and her orange Pinto,” Kuhn said.

After graduation, they all went their separate ways, but remained in touch as they built their careers and formed families.

Gibbons still lives in Arkansas; Steinbrenner now resides in the state of New York; and Warfel lives near St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the border.

Perry said she “liked it here,” and stayed in the area, living in Champaign, Urbana and Savoy at various points and working for many years at WILL radio and TV.

Kuhn lives in the Chicago suburbs after stints in San Diego and New Jersey. She recently retired after a career as an engineer. As a student at Illinois, she was one of only three women studying physics at the time.

Coming Home to Illinois

In 2019, the group decided to get together on campus, something they hadn’t done since graduating in 1976. Five years later, the timing was right for a return visit.

They noted how many new buildings were under construction in 2019, and they were impressed with how the construction turned out. While they lamented the fact that some of their favorite restaurants and hangout spots are no longer around, they were happy to see Papa Del’s is still thriving.

“One of the best parts of going to a university that has a long history is you can go back, and you do see a lot of familiar things,” Warfel said. “There may be a lot of things that aren’t there anymore, but there also are a lot of things that are still there – enough that you go, ‘Yeah, I was once part of this, and this is part of my history.’”

The group observed that walking through the Illini Union felt very familiar, though they admitted to being shocked by the progressive nature of the McKinley Self-Care Stations, which they found intriguing.

But they were most excited by the visit to Allen Hall.

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Reunited at Allen Hall in 2024 – from left to right: Denise Perry, Julie Kuhn, Laura Warfel, Jeanne Steinbrenner and Callye Gibbons.

They were impressed to see the addition of air conditioning in Allen Hall, and Gibbons raved about the “transformation” of dining services.

“It was so nice in the cafeteria, having cozy spots and small tables and not just long tables that I remembered when we were there,” she said.

The group debated whether the rooms seemed smaller or felt the same all these years later, but Warfel swears there are at least a few building features that haven’t changed at all.

“The tile on the [bathroom] walls has stood the test of time,” Warfel said. “Still looks perfect! And the mailboxes were still the same.”

Likewise, current students moving into a residence hall still go through many of the same challenges and opportunities that Warfel and her friends experienced in the ‘70s.

Words of Wisdom

In reflecting upon their experience in the residence halls, the group talked about occasional struggles that can come from being in a new setting, but they came to realize the importance of adapting to changes as an essential life skill. 

Steinbrenner talked about the challenge of being a morning person surrounded by night owls, and she encouraged incoming students to communicate about their lifestyle and find a roommate on a similar schedule as them.

Gibbons remembered how a few students struggled with having so much unstructured time, as “you can go wild easily,” but said she loved that sense of freedom.

But they all agreed that having the chance to meet and live with people from different backgrounds was an essential part of their college – and life – experience.

“I think a beauty of [residence hall] living is that you have to learn some skills about living with other people,” Kuhn said. “You’re living with somebody – what you do impacts someone else. That’s probably more important than any academic learning in college … the exposure to different types of people, different perspectives, different upbringings.”

It’s this exposure to different people and perspectives that can lead to new, unexpected friendships and lifelong connections.

“Many folks I know that were not living on campus missed a whole lot of that connection,” Gibbons said. “It makes a huge difference.”

Warfel agreed.

“I think from day one you’re looking for that place where you fit, where people accept you, and where you’re in your lane,” she said. “When you find that – sometimes you don’t even realize you have it, but when you find that, it makes all the difference.”

All photographs were submitted to University Housing for this story and used with kind permission.