Some Thoughts on PJC 1950-1961

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of The Pueblo Lore, the monthly magazine of the Pueblo County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author and the Historical Society.

My father, Mr. H. M. Pardun, moved the family to Pueblo in 1946 where he had a job with the Veteran’s Administration. During the early 1950’s he took a job as the Director of Student Personnel at Pueblo Junior College and worked there until he retired in about 1974 as the acting president of the school. My father settled into the college easily and became the person who helped students define their goals and then what they had to do to reach them. I remember that he was very happy when one of the faculty members nicknamed him “Pard” and it stuck. Having been saddled with the name Horace Milton he was happy to have a name that he could use. He was a great fan of cowboy stories on the level of Zane Grey and Pard sounded like a nickname for Partner, a western term of friendship.

After being hired by P.J.C. much of his, and his family’s, life revolved around it. On occasion the Bridge Club and the Faculty Wives met at our house. When the car needed brakes the automotive department students did the work. If he needed something welded the industrial shop students did it. PJC had a theater department that produced several children’s plays every year and students from across the city were bussed to PJC to attend. At that time PJC hosted the only live theater in Pueblo and I remember seeing Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Shakespeare’s “King Lear” at PJC.

Then there were the football and basketball games. PJC never excelled in football but made up for it on the basketball courts. In the early fifties many of the players were older students returning to school on the GI Bill. They were scrappy players who made up for their lack of height by their aggressiveness. Over the years coach Harry Simmons turned the basketball team into a powerhouse that eventually won the US basketball competition for two-year schools in 1961.

My father had strong beliefs about the value of education, equal treatment for everyone regardless of race or gender, and the importance of the Bill of Rights to the functioning of the United States. When he heard faculty members stumbling over Spanish surnames he began taking Spanish classes to learn to pronounce those names correctly.

We lived in Euclid street, a gravel street between the cemetery and the state fair grounds. This neighborhood was made up of working class families who worked at the CF&I, retired people, a man who made and raced stock cars in his spare time, a prostitute, several black families, the owner of La Tolteca Tortillaria and several families who had deaf parents. One of these families was the Brammells and Mr. Brammell was a janitor at PJC. My father was proud of the fact that Pueblo was the kind of town where the head of personnel could live next door to the janitor and their kids could play together.

When I graduated from Central High in 1959 there was no question where I would go to school. My father considered the first two years of college at PJC to be the equivalent of any other school around. During that time PJC consisted of the Administration Building and another building across from it, a Vocational Technical Building and a bunch of Quonset huts, one of which was the cafeteria. The second year I ws there a real “student union” was built.

I left PJC for the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1961. PJC was on the verge of becoming a four year school and was moving to a new campus northeast of town. In the process all of the technical part of the college, the machine and welding shops etc, were left behind. My father considered this a mistake because he felt that knowing how to do those things had value in and of itself. When my father died his children created a scholarship for students who were of Hispanic background.

Robert Pardun