| Part of the story... Using the Yellow Pages, Butch made a providential choice in
contacting the Virginia Foundry in Roanoke. When he told the
proprietor, Paul Huffman, what the Corps was after, Mr.
Huffman told him the foundry would do the casting free of
charge. Huffman was a long time fan of the Hokies and a
former Greenbrier cadet. Harper also learned that the money
that had been collected would purchase a gun carriage from the
Lorton Reformatory near Washington, D.C., where Civil War
replicas were created for local historical battlefields.
The brass was delivered to the foundry, and it was time to cast
the cannon. Huffman began pouring the donated brass into a
vat for melting down. Within minutes the foundry turned into a
war zone with bullets exploding and shooting out of the vat at
lightning speed. To everyone’s surprise, not all of the collected
bullet casings were empty. There were no injuries, other than
to the walls of the foundry. So Huffman regrouped, discarded
the bullet casings, and added brass from the foundry’s stock.
Needless to say, on Thanksgiving
Day 1963, the VMI Keydets were
speechless when VPI rolled out their
cannon and fired the first round. The
blast was so intense it rattled the
glass windows in the sportscasters’
booth. VPI won the game 35 to 20.
A tradition was born.
The Skipper is named in honor of
President John F. Kennedy, who was
assassinated the very day that the
boys were hauling the finished cannon back to Blacksburg from the foundry. Like all
Americans, the cadets were deeply affected by the President’s death. Later that day, they
decided to christen the cannon “Skipper” in honor of Kennedy’s naval career. |
