By Mariann Garner-Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 27, 2026
Robert Pardun was born June 30, 1941 and passed away January 16, 2026 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. The following is an excerpt from the cover of Robert Pardun’s book, Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties.
Robert Pardun was born in Kansas and raised on the edge of the prairie in Pueblo, Colorado. As a graduate student, he was a founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter at the University of Texas in 1964, became a regional SDS organizer, and then an SDS national officer in 1967-1968. This put him in the SDS national office at the height of the antiwar movement. After the collapse of SDS, he spent 1971-1976 on a commune in the Ozarks. Robert has been a math instructor, metal worker, and served as associate producer of the SDS documentary, Rebels with a Cause. [It is also the history of the vibrant and innovative SDS chapter at the University of Texas, one of the Prairie Power strongholds, where the cultural and political rebellion were united]…
The following was written by his long-time friend and colleague in Austin SDS and other ventures, Mariann Garner-Wizard, who now lives in Belize.
I met Bob in spring of 1965, when I first started meeting people in the UT Austin chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Bob was an SDS campus organizer and I was a freshman newbie.
At Easter there was a peace vigil outside then-President Lyndon B Johnson’s ranch. I didn’t go; I went home to see my family. Easter morning, flipping through the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, there was a picture of Bob, who I’d still barely met, sitting on the ground chatting with some other students. Bob was a nice-looking man, slim, with short pale hair and a nice, neat moustache. I pointed him out excitedly to my mom, “Look, Ma, I know this guy. He’s really smart and nice.” My mother, who rarely judged anyone, much less from a newspaper photo, adjusted her glasses and raised her eyebrows and studied the image. “Hmph!” she finally said. “He looks like a Communist to me!”
Back in Austin in the fall, after I’d started living with George Vizard, we visited Bob and Judy’s little bungalow in the back yard of a small house on King Street. I think Judy was at work when we got there but came in later. She was and is a tiny beauty, with great strength at her core.
What struck me most about Pardun’s house, however, was not the coffee, or the intelligent conversation that I tried to just take in, or how neat and clean and efficient-looking it was for the tiny space they shared; it was the books! Books by the dozens, big hardbound books to flimsy booklets, all arranged on cinder-block-and-board shelves against the walls, with more radical and socialist and anarchist literature than I knew existed, including the complete works of V.I. Lenin.
We were friends from that time until his passing, but really he was lost to me over 10 years ago when Parkinson’s took too great a toll on his physical and mental state and Helen, with whom he lived for over 20 years and did many wondrous things, moved with him into an assisted living facility near his young adult children in Portland.
I could probably write a book about just what I knew about and experienced and learned about because of Bob.
After Judy left with another SDS leader, George and I introduced Bob to Marilyn Buck and they went off to Chicago together to the SDS National Office. While Bob was in the National Office, we stayed in touch and he “encouraged” me into several undertakings on behalf of SDS, including a stint as Southern Regional Traveler, wherein I had many great adventures and met famous elder Leftists and student activists from Tennessee to New Orleans to Albuquerque.
Later on, when Bob came back to Austin alone. It wasn’t long until he was introduced to Linda Kerley, a luminous woman who he married not once but twice; I was there joyously both times. They left Austin and went “back to the land,” first to New Mexico, where oldest daughter Jody was born and I got to hold her tiny self on a cold winters night as Larry Waterhouse and I stopped by on our way back to Austin from Seaside, California. Later on, the Parduns went with other Austin folks to farm in Arkansas.
Their second daughter, Rachel, was born there but succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome. There was a rash of that in their area about that time. Linda came to believe it was due to Forest Service pollution of the groundwater upstream from the farm.
Soon the Parduns moved to Portland, Oregon. Linda became a public school teacher and Bob taught math, I believe at the local community college. Son Jesse and daughter Heather were born there, completing the family unit.
Years went by with little contact between us. Bob and Linda and Jody came to Austin in 1992 for publication of No Apologies: Texas Radicals Celebrate the 60s, a collection of essays edited by Daryl Janes to which both Bob and I contributed. That was when Bob and Linda got married for the second time, so they could buy a house; Oregon did not recognize their earlier common-law marriage. Bob Breihan of the Methodist Student Center and University Methodist Church did the honors.
The next year, after visiting the Parduns again, I put a down payment on a house in Portland with plans to move with my son Matt. When we arrived from Austin, we found that Bob and Linda had gone on an unusual solo camping trip. Bob had taken the opportunity to tell Linda, after 26 years together, that he was leaving her for Helen Garvy, who he’d known way back when in Chicago and who he’d been visiting periodically in California where they’d started work on Rebels with A Cause, the book and the movie.
Sometime after I got back to Texas, I was hired on an emergency basis in 2002 to pull together a cannabis legalization campaign in Alaska and got to visit Linda a few times in Juneau, where she’d gone to teach after the big break-up. She was as warm, generous, and beautiful as ever and we had a great time together.
The next year, I saw Bob on a six-week West Coast road trip. I got to see a lot of dear friends and family before visiting Bob and Helen’s place in Los Gatos. They were happy, and they both showed me a good time.
I guess that was the last time I saw Bob in the flesh. One day while I was there, I woke up, looked out the window, and saw Bob up high in a tree with a power saw while Helen held the ladder and told him to “Be careful!”
Alice Embree has said, and she’s right, that Robert Pardun was the best organizer she ever met in SDS. Same for me. He never argued or tried to push people into things they couldn’t or didn’t want to do. He just quietly explained how he saw situations and what might be done, and you found yourself saying, “I could do that,” and then doing it, surprising yourself with abilities you never suspected you had. He told me my talent, in contrast, was in “buttonholing” people, which essentially means getting in somebody’s grill and telling them what I really wish they’d do until get tired of hearing it, surrender, and just do it. It’s a little different style than his gentle logic, but you know, you do what works.
Bob Pardun was an extraordinary person, and I was blessed to know him. His memoir, Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties, is the most honest and least self-serving such book I’ve seen. Anyone who lived through those times without loving more than one person missed out on the best part, far as I’m concerned. Never deny loving anyone.
Parkinson’s, that Bob’s mother had, really started hitting him hard about the time I moved to Belize. Somehow I always thought I’d see him one more time. But it’s OK — he had a great life and was true to himself. Rest in peace, amigo — catch you on the next wave!
