The other leaders in their ice-breaker group thought he was joking. Levinson, however, isn’t surprised that Kaine has been so successful, because Kaine is a “very matter-of-fact guy and a go-getter.”

“He was completely serious,” Levinson said. “He had a path set for himself early in life, and he devoted himself to public service and has stuck with it.”

MU was an important first step along Kaine’s path. Along with being a Summer Welcome leader, Kaine was a senator in the Missouri Students Association, a teaching assistant for an economics course and a member of two secret societies at MU.

“He definitely set the standard for a lot of things,” said David Roloff, who was a student coordinator during Kaine’s time as a Summer Welcome leader. “I think a lot of times, people started to follow his lead. So I think it was fantastic having him be one of the core group of orientation leaders who set the whole tone for the summer.”

Kaine graduated from MU in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He went on to earn a law degree from Harvard in 1983.

In 2006, Kaine was elected governor of Virginia. In 2013, he became a U.S. senator. And in the summer of 2016, 39 years after he was a Summer Welcome leader, he was selected to be the vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

The MU Kaine knew was shaped by the tail end of student activism movements surrounding the Vietnam War and the counterculture of the 1960s.

“In the mid-1970s, people were still wearing their hair pretty long, and there was still a fair amount of students’ activism being expressed around the exercise of student authority through things like the Missouri Students Association and the like,” said Jim Pfander, who was a TA with Kaine for the economics course. Pfander became Kaine’s roommate after they both graduated from law school years later.

In the spring of 1970, “college students spilled out of their dorms and classes and onto the Quadrangle in the wake of the Cambodian air bombing that Nixon had conducted,” said Pfander, who was a student at Hickman High School in Columbia at the time.

The shooting of students by the National Guard at Kent State University furthered the protest movements on college campuses, including MU, but the level of activism had decreased by the time Pfander and Kaine arrived.

“One way to kind of identify the end of student activism of that character is to look at the spring of 1974, which was the ‘spring of streaking,’ which became quite popular,” Pfander said. “That was right before I started school at Missouri in the fall of 1974. That suggests a certain relaxation of the student seriousness that had characterized life on the Missouri campus up till that point.”

It was in this relaxed atmosphere that Kaine started meeting his friends at MU.

Booches, or “Club LaBooche,” as Kaine called it, was Kaine’s restaurant of choice in Columbia, Roloff said during a September walk from his office in the Reynolds Alumni Center. Roloff is the director of marketing and strategic communication for the Mizzou Alumni Association.

At least once a week, Kaine and his friends would spontaneously run into each other on campus and hang out.

“That was back in the late ‘70s before there was Facebook, Snapchat and everything else,” Roloff said. “So you didn’t know where everybody was, so you became friendly with the people you came into contact on campus with. Changing classes, you’d bump into somebody and spend a couple hours at [The] Heidelberg together.”

Roloff recalls MU’s campus looking a little different than it does today. But, “Jesse Hall is pretty much the same as it was in the ‘70s.”

Roloff and Kaine had the privilege to climb to the top of Jesse Hall. Roloff, photo editor of The Maneater at the time, was doing a photo story on the dome. They walked to the north end of the top floor of Jesse where they entered through a room, which led to a spiral staircase and ladder up to the small balcony above Jesse.