Dick Penner joined the faculty of the English Department in 1965 and retired as professor of English in 1998. Highly respected by his students, his published works include Fiction of the Absurd: Pratfalls in the Void (New English Library, 1980); Allan Sillitoe (Twayne’s English Authors series); and Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Greenwood Press, 1989).
To the world other than the academic, he is known as a Rockabilly author and performer, and his songs are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On the roof of a fraternity house in the 1950s, he and Wade Lee Moore, both students at North Texas State University, wrote the song “Ooby Dooby” (1955), made famous by Roy Orbison. Fifty years later, that song (and another Penner/Moore composition sung by the duo, “Bop Bop Baby”), would appear in the movie Walk the Line.
Penner had a composer contract with Sam Harbison, and he and Moore had a performance contract, playing as the College Kids (sometimes spelled the “Kollege” Kids). Penner made his last record in 1957. In the mid-1970s, two unissued songs, “Fine Little Baby” and “Move Baby Move” were legally issued in France from Sun label (Sun 615). Since then, Dick Penner’s recorded work has been featured on a number of Rockabilly records.
Following a six months’ stint in the army in 1958, Penner decided to return to his studies with a view to becoming a professor of English. Following retirement, he pursued his hobby of photography, receiving considerable notice for his artistic abilities in that medium.