A cannon’s tale

It was the early ’80s. The Phi Sigma Kappa Fraternity was popular on campus and could always be counted on to cheer loudly at football games.

One day, one of the members had an idea. He wanted to build a cannon and shoot it off every time the Griffons scored a touchdown.

Dirck Clark ’85 was a member of the Phi Sigs and suggested enlisting help from his grandfather, Jimmy Boatright, who was a farmer in the Savannah, Missouri, area. Clark and his fraternity brothers, his grandfather and his uncle Ernie Bowman got together on the farm and started to build.

“Our job was to make smart aleck comments and get in the way,” Clark said of the students helping.

No plans were drawn up for the cannon, and parts were found around the farm. The wheels, for example, came from a horse-drawn drill planter that Clark estimates is at least 100 years old now.

The actual building of the cannon wasn’t too difficult, but the firing mechanism took more thought, Clark said. The first mechanism used gunpowder and “rocked the stadium.”

The fraternity’s advisor, longtime chemistry professor Dr. Len Archer, told them they needed to come up with a safer mechanism before “someone gets nicknamed Lefty.”

With Dr. Archer’s help, they did: a gas-filled balloon that was ignited with a blow torch. It worked well and no one lost a limb.

Clark says the cannon, nicknamed “The General,” continued to be used for several years after he graduated, but by the mid-1990s, it was no longer part of the games. Then the fraternity disbanded on campus and the cannon was lost. Clark said he searched for it for years.

Finally, in 2011, someone told him they thought they had seen pieces of it in a junk pile. By that time, the Phi Sigs had returned to campus, and were only too happy to restore it.

“It looks like the day we built it,” Clark said. “I am so happy and so proud of what they did. I wish my grandfather could see it (he passed away in 1987).”

The cannon was fired during the 2012 and 2013 football seasons and at the end of the 2014 Commencement ceremony in Spratt Memorial Stadium, but now it stands at attention near the end zone of Craig Field. The General may not make much noise these days, but it remains a monument to Griffon spirit, fraternity brotherhood and good old-fashioned ingenuity.