From its construction in 1919 until its destruction in 1992, men’s dorm Pardee Hall sat resolute on what is now Pardee Lawn. It was in these hallowed halls that the infamous band of misfits—the Pardee Rowdies— began.
According to Milligan alumnus (class of 1977) and Pardee Rowdy Dr. Paul Blowers (Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History at Emmanuel Christian Seminary), Pardee Hall was a place surrounded by “a certain mystique.” Set apart from other dorms for its constant pranking, Pardee’s open and spacious layout lent to its “frat house” feel. A place that fostered strong community, it was made up of three floors of rooms, a shared shower room in the basement, a big lobby where there was always a card game happening and a central staircase where many a conversation carried long into the night.
Pardee’s layout was also conducive to pranks of all sorts, and its residents certainly took advantage of this fact. Blowers said that a classic theme of Pardee’s pranks was water balloons.
“We were constantly playing pranks on each other,” he said. “There was a side door that everyone went in and out of, and every night when you came back from the cafeteria and came in that door, you had to look up because more than likely someone was either going to hit you with a water balloon or dump an entire bucket of water down on you. You would get soaked.”
Blowers recalled a time when the female residents of Hart Hall got a taste of Pardee’s pranks.
“It was right before Christmas and some of the female students came down the hill from Hart to sing Christmas carols to us,” he began. “Being the naughty boys that they were, the Pardee Rowdies were up on the third floor throwing water balloons down at these poor women who were singing beautiful Christmas carols to us. It was freezing cold outside and they were getting blasted with water balloons. So sad,” he said, laughing.
For Blowers, Pardee was a place with a “wonderful chemistry of people.”
“There were a lot of guys who probably would have been lost in a state university or a large school- but at Milligan they were able to fit in, and Pardee Hall was just a great place that played a large part in that,” he said.
The term “Pardee Rowdies” came in the wake of the camaraderie of the mischievous residents of Pardee Hall, and began being used in the mid-seventies as a way of “keeping the mystique and myth alive.” Today, the Rowdies keep in touch mainly through a Facebook page that one alumnus created for other Pardee veterans to share old tales of Rowdy glory and photos. They have also reunited in person a few times over the years, the latest reunion being in 2003.
Blowers said that one of his most vivid memories at Pardee was when extreme warfare broke out between Webb Hall and Pardee.
“A bunch of us got called to the dean of students office because … we had this bottle rocket war between Pardee and Webb,” he said. “This was back when it was just the road that went up between the two buildings–and we just opened fire on each other across it. It’s not the safest thing to be shooting bottle rockets at each other point-blank, so we got in trouble for that.”
Unlike more modern dorms, Pardee used a steam radiator instead of electrical heating. Blowers said he remembered one particularly cold winter in the mid-seventies when Milligan was on a tight budget and resorted to turning Pardee’s thermostat down.
“You could see your breath in your room,” Blowers said, laughing. “Those were the lean years, but that was part of the mystique of the place.”
Blowers leaned back in his chair in his Emmanuel office, smiling at the recollection of the misadventures of the Pardee Rowdies.
“They were tearing down Pardee in the summer of ‘92, and a bunch of us saw it tumbling down,” he said. “I went in there one night before they completely destroyed it. I went back to one of my old rooms and grabbed a chair– and I still have that chair at home along with some bricks I kept.”
Whether through pelting each other and innocent bystanders with water balloons, freezing in their rooms, or engaging in ferocious bottle rocket warfare with Webb Hall, there is no doubt that Pardee Hall and its Rowdies live in infamy on Milligan’s campus– and in the hearts of those whose lives were changed by the place and its people.