Harper Talks Episode 54 – Kris Piepenburg

00:00.660Brian Shelton: I'm Brian Shelton, and you're listening to Harper Talks, a co-production of Harper College Alumni Relations and Harper Radio. Today on Harper Talks, I'm excited to speak with Kris Piepenburg. Kris is a professor of English at Harper College, and like a few previous faculty guests, he's also an alum of Harper College. I've wanted to have Kris on the show for a long time, and as he's retiring this year, it's kind of like no time at the present, you know, just getting you just in time.

00:24.920Kris Piepenburg: Just in time. Just the perfect time.

00:26.300Brian Shelton: Just the perfect time.

00:27.260Kris Piepenburg: Thank you, Brian, for having me on the program.

00:29.680Brian Shelton: Thanks. So Kris is joining me here in Building D Media Lab. So we're not only recording the podcast for audio, but we're also on video for the video production students. And they're shooting this for their final project. So you'll be able to see the video on the Harper Talks webpage. So cool. Kris, how you doing?

00:47.720Kris Piepenburg: Well, you've caught me after a couple of heavy weeks of paper grading. Yeah. So my brain is a little fogged.

00:57.500Brian Shelton: A little fogged.

00:58.380Kris Piepenburg: But yeah, I'm doing well. It's starting to lift. Okay. Yeah.

01:03.900Brian Shelton: How are the papers these days?

01:05.480Kris Piepenburg: Some are excellent, and, uh, there, there's a range, of course.

01:11.580Brian Shelton: Yeah.

01:11.820Kris Piepenburg: Okay. Right.

01:12.820Brian Shelton: All right, well, let's get into it. Um, you were a Harper student from 1979 to 1981, and I'm curious, as someone who grew up around here, what brought you to Harper College? How'd you come here?

01:23.460Kris Piepenburg: Uh, well, I was a Palatine High School graduate, and, uh, I didn't have a lot of guidance about college, from my high school guidance counselor. And, uh, I'm the youngest in my family also, and there'd been some kind of, um, not so positive experiences with my older siblings going away to college.

01:49.510Brian Shelton: Okay.

01:50.290Kris Piepenburg: And, uh, I kind of understood that, yeah, I'm probably going to be staying home. And since I didn't really have a plan and didn't really know what college was for, essentially. Yeah. I probably just told my guidance counselor, "Yeah, I'm going to Harper." Going to Harper. You know, and then he stopped trying to reach me. It was easy to go to Harper then.

02:15.960Brian Shelton: Yeah.

02:16.260Kris Piepenburg: Yeah.

02:16.600Brian Shelton: Right. For sure. Yeah. Older siblings in the late '60s and early '70s, I can imagine how their college experience went. Maybe they had a little too much fun?

02:25.800Kris Piepenburg: Well, I don't want to...

02:27.420Brian Shelton: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:28.700Kris Piepenburg: I don't want to out anything here on the radio about them because I know one will probably hear it. But my parents did not go to college and they really wanted to send their children to college, but I don't think they really understood what that entailed and what the purpose was either. So it was a bit ambiguous and it was kind of like, well, just go there and do what they tell you to do. And so I think two of my older siblings were sent and didn't really—

03:15.280Brian Shelton: Didn't work out.

03:15.560Kris Piepenburg: Yeah, it didn't work out. Sure. But things worked out differently and better for them eventually.

03:24.190Brian Shelton: Eventually, yeah.

03:24.630Kris Piepenburg: You know.

03:25.790Brian Shelton: Sure. So I'm kind of curious, '79, what was the campus like?

03:29.930Kris Piepenburg: Well, obviously fewer buildings. Right. I was sitting outside Building C here yesterday and looking at the back wall of Building L and thinking, well, when I was a student here, that wasn't here. And I looked over at Building P, the music building,, and I thought, well, that was here. Uh, so what was here where Building L is? Just a big empty space, basically grass. Yeah. Leading to the parking lot on the Algonquin Road side. And of course the library was here. That was Building F. Um, and the library was always in that building. Mm-hmm. But, but yeah, much, many fewer buildings. Um, right. And, and the only, building really that feels original here anymore is Building A. Yeah. That feels like a time capsule in some respects.

04:25.570Brian Shelton: Yeah.

04:25.950Kris Piepenburg: Yeah.

04:25.990Brian Shelton: That's kind of the long-running joke is that we always bring alumni to Building A because it looks exactly the way it did when they were here.

04:32.870Kris Piepenburg: So. I actually took pictures of the third floor of Building A and sent them to a guy named Fred Waters, who was the student activities director. When I was here as a student. I'm still in touch with him, and what is it, almost 50 years later. And of course he's in his 70s now and happily retired in Tennessee, but I was able to show him it still kind of looks the same.

04:57.900Brian Shelton: Still kind of the same.

04:58.900Kris Piepenburg: Yeah.

04:59.100Brian Shelton: Right. Now you were here during, I think from all the research that I've done on this time period and all the people I've talked to, you were here during kind of a really interesting time on this campus because You were involved in a lot of stuff. You were involved as a DJ at WHCM, at the radio station, but you were also on the Campus Activities Board programming music. And Harper used to have a lot of really big name acts come through here.

05:21.870Kris Piepenburg: Oh, right. That was central to my Harper experience.

05:25.370Brian Shelton: Yeah, tell us about that.

05:26.110Kris Piepenburg: Was being on the Harper College Program Board, they called it then. It was a group of students who had different responsibilities for the Student Activities Program, programming on the campus. And Fred Waters was the Student Activities Director then. He was the guy before Mike Nejman. And, um, you know, with Fred, he helped us book concert acts. I learned how that works and what concert acts are paid and how to put on a show and um, which vendors you need to work with and who on campus provides what. And we had, uh, Pat Metheny here.

06:11.850Brian Shelton: Wow.

06:12.470Kris Piepenburg: Um, for the end of my last year here, which would have been the spring of '81, and that show was in Building M. Full house, beautiful concert. And I remember that the contract for Pat Metheny, the cost was $15,000. Wow. And that was huge money for us then. We got that huge money because we booked Survivor halfway through that year, who cost only $2,500, but they had just hit with "Eye of the Tiger."

06:50.380Brian Shelton: Right.

06:50.900Kris Piepenburg: So they were huge. And we sold that one out too in Building M. And made a lot of money. Yeah. So we could get Pat Metheny, which was really quite something.

07:01.200Brian Shelton: What was, what was ticket cost? Do you remember?

07:03.480Kris Piepenburg: No, that I— that has escaped me now. Right. But, but, uh, yeah, all the high school kids turned out for Survivor.

07:10.750Brian Shelton: Yeah.

07:11.070Kris Piepenburg: And The Hounds opened, um, which they were a Chicago kind of glam band, I guess.

07:17.830Brian Shelton: Yeah.

07:18.540Kris Piepenburg: Um, but yeah, we had Jerry Jeff Walker here, uh, that fall, and, uh, Ramsey Lewis, Tim Weissberg, those acts were in the $5,000 range. Yeah. And, and they played in Building A. Yeah. Uh, some of them, smaller room and different acoustics, of course. Yeah.

07:41.470Brian Shelton: There's been a lot of big name acts on this campus.

07:43.430Kris Piepenburg: Oh yeah, I know. Yeah, some I wish I had seen. Yeah, right. Pretty cool.

07:48.290Brian Shelton: Yeah. You were also a DJ at WHCM. What was it like back during that time?

07:52.210Kris Piepenburg: Well, that's kind a funny thing because until a couple of years ago, I still work at WHCM in that nice new studio that you helped design and helped get put together. But up until a couple of years ago, the broadcast studio was the same as it was when I was a student here.

08:16.900Brian Shelton: Right.

08:18.200Kris Piepenburg: The same little cubicle And, um, of course the equipment was different and upgraded and better, but it was really odd to sit in that studio again a few years ago after, what, you know, 40 years of not having been in there, right? And it's still the same. Yeah, so that was funny.

08:43.650Brian Shelton: Yeah. What drew you to college radio when you were a student here?

08:46.350Kris Piepenburg: I, uh, was involved with the sort of mock pretend radio station in high school. We did not have a real radio station. It just broadcast to the cafeteria.

09:00.180Brian Shelton: Okay.

09:00.740Kris Piepenburg: But I was so passionate about music then growing up in the 1970s, and that was a way to experience and share music. By, by broadcasting it. I hadn't learned how to play my own music yet, that came later. But, um, yeah, the, uh, interest in music has been a passion since I was a little kid. Yeah. So, and then coming here and finding out Harper had a somewhat better radio setup, that was pretty exciting.

09:37.640Brian Shelton: Yeah. And so now you, uh, in the last few years you're back DJing. Tell us about your show.

09:42.670Kris Piepenburg: Oh yeah, right. Well, um, it is so nice to be broadcasting to the world.

09:48.940Brian Shelton: Yeah.

09:49.580Kris Piepenburg: Which I just pinch myself to think of the potential, uh, for that, that my cousin in Australia can listen to WHCM, right? Um, as easily as, uh, you know, people, um, in Russia or somewhere out in the Pacific Islands or something. And so there's a lot of potential there, and that's kind of nice to know that, that people can actually hear me through the Harper Radio website, the streaming service. And then people locally tune in, and the program is 2 and a half hours of some pretty strange music on Friday nights. It's called All Over the Map, 7 o'clock American Central Time is what I say in my social media posts. So yeah, I'm always exploring and discovering new music that I haven't heard to play on the radio.

10:55.230Brian Shelton: Yeah, yeah, I always love when I catch your show.

10:56.870Kris Piepenburg: Yeah, thanks.

10:57.990Brian Shelton: So you're into music, but obviously you went to school— you went to school here and then you went on to UIC and got your bachelor's and master's in in English.

11:06.630Kris Piepenburg: Right.

11:07.130Brian Shelton: I'm curious what inspired you to go down that road. I mean, did you, did you want to be a writer or what was the, what was the passion there?

11:13.790Kris Piepenburg: Well, there were a few things that I was considering when I was a Harper student. One was radio. The second was geology. I was really interested in geology. The geology courses here taught by Paul Sapira and Larry Knight were outstanding. And really interesting field trips. And, but I couldn't handle the chemistry involved with geology. Right. And I also took English and creative writing classes here taught by Frank Smith, who was really a deep influence on me. And, uh, that convinced me to major in English and, uh, go on to UIC and, um, finish a bachelor's in English, which was kind of a general thing then. Sure. And then you could study for a master's in creative writing, which I did. Um, that was, uh, you know, I was in my early 20s when I finished my master's and, and still didn't really know, um, enough to really write that well, I don't think.

12:24.800Brian Shelton: So you went into the publishing business?

12:26.920Kris Piepenburg: I did go into publishing after that, right? Medical publishing. Which I tell my students about that. And I spent 8 years reading manuscripts. Well, the first 5 years reading manuscripts written by veterinarians about treatments for animals and surgeries on animals and things like that. Research in animal science. And then I spent a few years reading and editing articles written by radiologists about human medicine. And by the end of it, I just, I had to stop. It's just like, I can't do 40 hours a week sitting at a desk reading and writing. And back then, uh, email didn't even exist, right, until the very end of my publishing career, we worked with colored pencils. That's the, you know, at the AVMA here in Schaumburg, American Veterinary Medical Association, my color was blue. So somebody else had orange, somebody was green. So you know who made these marks on this and like, who did this? Oh, it's blue.

13:45.180Brian Shelton: You know, it's Mr. Blue.

13:47.500Kris Piepenburg: Yeah. Right. So yeah, I went into publishing and I tell my students that that's the kind of job that you want to keep a bottle in the desk drawer and a pack of cigarettes in the desk drawer because it's painful. And not that those are good ways to deal with pain, obviously they aren't. And I didn't do that, but it just felt that way.

14:11.840Brian Shelton: Totally understand.

14:13.280Kris Piepenburg: Yeah.

14:14.270Brian Shelton: Well, how did you make the transition from the publishing world to faculty?

14:18.570Kris Piepenburg: Well, I had been writing poetry still, and I kept in touch with one of my former professors here, actually, Frank Smith, who I mentioned earlier. And we would get together now and then. I'd see him here at Harper just to chat, or— but eventually I started to get more of a collection of poems together. And he had started a small publication called the White Eagle Coffee Store Press.

14:52.800Brian Shelton: Okay.

14:53.430Kris Piepenburg: And he was based in Cary, Illinois, where he still lives. And he had published a few books with that publishing name, and he wanted to publish a book for me, which was really generous and helpful. And that led to me teaching here part-time, just one class in the spring of '95.

15:19.670Brian Shelton: Okay.

15:20.310Kris Piepenburg: Yeah. So that's how I made the transition.

15:24.110Brian Shelton: Made the transition. Was it— I've met, we've had a few people here who were students at Harper and then came back here to teach. I'm curious, was it weird being on campus, teaching on a campus where you probably, some of your professors that you had as a student are still working, I would imagine?

15:38.430Kris Piepenburg: Yeah, it was a little strange. I, um, I felt like I never left here though, having been a student graduating here from '80 in '81 and, um, finishing my publishing career. I was kind of done with that by 1993 and working freelance, which wasn't working too well. And then, you know, moving into teaching, it felt a little strange, but I also felt like I belonged here, um, that this was a home. In a way.

16:10.870Brian Shelton: A home, then a comfortable place.

16:12.490Kris Piepenburg: Yeah, I always seem to gravitate back. Yeah, to Harper.

16:16.510Brian Shelton: Yeah.

16:16.770Kris Piepenburg: Okay, right.

16:18.250Brian Shelton: Yeah. So I don't know, what's the day in the life of an English— I'm a professor, but what's the day in the life of an English professor? What's, what's that like?

16:24.970Kris Piepenburg: Um, well, a day in the life is, uh, yeah, every semester has cycles and seasons, you might say, and, uh, the first few weeks are kind of a fun season where you haven't had too much work turned in yet that you need to grade and respond to. That's the real work. Yeah. And a day in the life is answering a lot of email from online students and trying to make the online classes work well. And keeping people connected to them by being responsive. And then the in-person classes, you know, you just have to be ready. I never want to have a bad class, and so I over-prepare, and I try to make the class work well and be halfway entertaining. And I respond to things that happen in class, like people abruptly getting up and leaving, or a guy with his head down on the table or desk. And I try not to have it be upsetting or anything, just try to use humor to get through it. And, but a day in the life does involve a lot of reading. Yeah, it's a lot of reading. And in paper grading season where I am now, I'm about read out.

18:03.010Brian Shelton: Right.

18:03.430Kris Piepenburg: Yeah.

18:04.030Brian Shelton: Yeah. Don't want to read anymore. I find that too. Even just the amount of papers that I read, I don't want to read for pleasure because I'm reading so many student papers that I don't want to. And so in the summer when I get a little bit of a break from reading so many papers, I'll grab a book and just fall into it and really enjoy myself. And then I won't read again for 16 weeks. Yeah.

18:23.490Kris Piepenburg: That has happened for me too. And I wish it hadn't. I have all these books in my my office and people stop by and they're looking at my bookshelf and I often say, "Well, I haven't read a lot of those." And my friend Andrew Wilson will say, "Well, I have a lot of books I haven't read too." So I think that's fairly common. Yeah.

18:47.110Brian Shelton: One of my favorite student stories many years ago, he walks in my office and I had the Dalai Lama's book, The Art of Happiness, on my bookshelf and it had a bookmark in the middle of it and he says, he looks at me and he says, "Art of Happiness. I see you haven't finished that one yet," which is more of a comment on me.

19:02.540Kris Piepenburg: And no one ever finishes that one.

19:04.420Brian Shelton: Yeah, no one finishes that one. But it was fun. So you're retiring this year. You going to miss it?

19:12.240Kris Piepenburg: Yeah, there are things I will miss, certainly. The classroom is definitely something I will miss. My students in my Monday night class were asking me that. And just this week actually, and that, that was my answer. The classroom is a place where something new can happen any minute. Sure. And that's one of the things I've enjoyed about teaching is that possibility for things to be unique and different every class session, even though some of my materials might be similar to what they were the previous semester, or we're reading something that I've taught before, the students make it different every time.

20:03.310Brian Shelton: Sure.

20:03.850Kris Piepenburg: And I enjoy that. Yeah. And I enjoy the interaction in the classroom. I enjoy the, the opportunities to have some fun with the interaction and, and joke around some in hopefully not predictable ways. Yeah, so yeah, I will miss that aspect, and I will miss my friends that I've made here at the college. I've known so many people here. Thousands of people have been in contact with the students, employees, other faculty. And I wanted to put a big— I wanted to cover my office door with paper and write all their names on it and then write on it, "A thousand— thousands of goodbyes," you know, because that's— it's been thousands of hellos and goodbyes, really.

21:02.270Brian Shelton: For sure.

21:02.850Kris Piepenburg: And there are people, you know, I remember that I'm sure I'll never forget. Yeah.

21:07.930Brian Shelton: And it goes by so quickly too.

21:09.470Kris Piepenburg: It really does.

21:09.990Brian Shelton: Like one day you think, "Oh, it's 30 years till I retire," and then you come to that date and you're like, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe that that went by so quickly.

21:16.530Kris Piepenburg: It has gone extremely quickly. Yeah, right.

21:19.470Brian Shelton: Yeah, it's a strange thing. Well, I'm not just saying this because you're here on the show. I just want to say to you that, um, that I've really enjoyed getting to know you over the years that I've been here. And in the last, you know, 3, 4, 5 years since you've been doing stuff at the radio station, I've gotten the chance to talk to you an awful lot. And just stopping by the office to have a quick conversation, even if it's just us complaining to each other about what's going on. Yeah, I've just really, really appreciate it. And I'm glad that you're still going to be around doing some radio.

21:42.670Kris Piepenburg: Oh yes, I will continue with the radio program. And, and that's mutual, Brian. I've enjoyed getting getting to know you and working with you too. It's been fun.

21:53.010Brian Shelton: It's been great to have you here at the college, and it'll be the college's loss not to have you in the classroom, but you deserve— you'll get to read what you want to read.

22:01.230Kris Piepenburg: I need some time away from the heavy reading, which people think, well, what's so hard? What's the big deal? The problem is you are reading and evaluating at the same time, and you're trying to help You're writing comments, you're helping students with grammar and other things like that. And that's a little bit brain-draining. It's not reading for pleasure. It's work. Yeah. Yeah. So you do it too. I know.

22:33.160Brian Shelton: Yeah.

22:33.480Kris Piepenburg: Yeah.

22:34.420Brian Shelton: Well, thanks for being on episode 54, Kris. While Kris is retiring from the college, I'm retiring as the host of Harper Talks. It's been an honor to host the show with my producer Shannon Hynes and to speak to all of our wonderful alumni. The show will go on and I look forward to listening to more alumni stories. Kris Peipenburg is a graduate of Harper College and a retiring professor of English. If you're enjoying Harper Talks, please subscribe, and while you're at it, rate and review us so that others might find us. Harper Talks is a co-production of Harper College Alumni Relations and Harper Radio. Our show is produced by Shannon Hynes. This episode is edited by Coby Pozo, and our online content producer is Blue Bailey. Our theme music was created by Aiden Cashman. I'm Brian Shelton. Thanks for listening.

23:17.100Kris Piepenburg: Thanks for having me on your program, Brian. Thanks for being here. Yep.