Skipper, the Cannon Built to Answer VMI

To understand Skipper, start with VMI. The two schools are 84 miles apart, and for most of Tech’s history Thanksgiving meant playing them.

The first game was on Thanksgiving Day 1894 in Staunton. VMI won 10-6, and the whole VAMC corps made the trip. In 1895 VAMC won 6-4 in Lynchburg. Then the game settled in Roanoke.

Virginia Tech’s traditions page says Tech played VMI in Roanoke on Thanksgiving for nearly 75 years. Special Collections describes the week around it: dances, dinners and parades. It usually wrapped up with a Sunday Thanksgiving feast back in the College Mess Hall, and a 1924 menu survives.

The rivalry had real history behind it. Tech’s first commandant, Gen. James H. Lane, was a VMI graduate. Both schools were Southern Conference members from 1924 to 1964. In 1955 Gov. Thomas B. Stanley awarded the Governor’s Sword, a Spanish ceremonial sword, to Tech for winning the 51st meeting.

It was also where Tech tried things out. The first permanent Gobbler costume debuted at the 1962 Thanksgiving VMI game. And at those games, VMI had something Tech did not.

VMI brought a small cannon called "Little John" and fired it at the Thanksgiving game. Its cadets turned to the VPI side and chanted, "Where’s your cannon?"

Two Tech cadets, Homer "Sonny" Hickam and Alton "Butch" Harper Jr., both Class of 1964, decided that was enough. They made a pact to build a bigger one. Wikipedia places the pact in 1962, when they were juniors in Alpha Company. George Fox, also of the Class of 1964, became the third builder. Yes, that Hickam: the traditions page calls him "of October Sky fame."

They needed brass, so they collected it. Cadets gave up uniform brass and shell casings. Hickam added large brass gears from the Coalwood, W.Va., mine where his father was superintendent.

Paul Huffman, Corps Class of 1937, cast the barrel for free at the Virginia Foundry Company in Roanoke. Unspent shell casings exploded in the melt, so he swapped in Navy gun-metal brass. The carriage came from a woodworking shop at Lorton Reformatory near Washington, D.C.

The cadets picked up the barrel and carriage on Nov. 22, 1963. That same day, they heard on the radio that President Kennedy had been shot.

They named the cannon for him. Kennedy had been a PT-boat skipper, so the cannon became Skipper.

The word had a second meaning on campus, and the sources do not agree on it. Wikipedia says a "skipper" was a senior private with no stripes. VT News says a senior cadet private who had gotten into trouble. Hokiesports says a fifth-year cadet still in the Corps. Pick your favorite; the JFK honor is the part everyone agrees on.

Skipper’s first public firing was not at a football game. It was a 50-round salute to Kennedy on the Upper Quad.

Six days later, on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1963, Tech played VMI at Victory Stadium in Roanoke. About 50 cadets hauled the roughly 1,000-pound cannon out from under the bleachers.

The crew loaded a tripled charge. When it went off, it blew the hats off VMI cadets and shook the press-box glass. Hickam remembers the Tech corps answering the old taunt with "Here’s our cannon!" Tech won 35-20.

That is the whole tradition in one afternoon: a taunt, an answer and a boom.

The original Skipper fired for 19 years. In February 1982, after the Military Ball, it suffered a blowout, and the barrel was retired.

Paul Huffman Jr., Class of 1978, the original caster’s son, made Skipper II for free in 1984. It debuted at homecoming that October. The design compares to a 3-inch ordnance rifle: 70 inches long and about 800 pounds.

Hokiesports says the original barrel is now in the Corps of Cadets Museum.

Skipper II lives in "the Cave," a basement room of Pearson Hall East on the Upper Quad. Look for the two crossed cannons carved above the entrance, then peek through the viewing window.

A crew of 17 sophomore and junior cadets, led by a gun captain and chosen through a "tap" process, runs it. Each charge is aluminum foil packed with 8 ounces of black powder.

On game day, VT News says, Skipper fires twice at Hokie Village, when the team walks by, to start the March to Victory, at the end of the national anthem, after every score and at the end of the game. It also fires three times for each Corps pass in review, and at the Caldwell Marches and Ring Premiere. Its first trip out of Virginia is believed to be the 2016 Battle at Bristol.

Skipper is not the only Corps tradition that involves fire. No later than the 1960s, cadets carried a Flaming VT through campus, and sometimes through town, to Thursday-night pep rallies at the War Memorial. It is a metal V-with-T frame woven with kerosene-soaked toilet paper and set alight. In the 1990s it moved to Homecoming pep rallies on the Alumni Hall lawn.

And VMI came back. On Sept. 5, 2026, the two schools met at Lane Stadium for the 80th time, the first meeting since 1984. It was the eighth game between them at Lane and James Franklin’s debut as head coach. Tech leads the series 49-25-5.

More than 2,200 cadets from both schools joined a combined march. Hickam and Harper were there too, as honorary guests of the Skipper crew. Sixty-three years after "Where’s your cannon?", everybody knew exactly where it was.