Sinking of Boat Myth or Fact?

But where there are adolescents there will alway be pranks; and where there are adolescents and a lake, there are bound to be ingenious ones.

One which seems to have taken on a life of its own invovles the cannon and a billard ball, or as some versions have it, a golf ball..

As the story goes, one night an enterprising cadet placed a billard ball inside the cannon. When it was fired at Reveille the next morning, the ball headed like a guided missle for one of the sailboats moored at the Naval pier, sinking the boat to the bottom of the lake..

ALthought this tale has been heard over and over , no one could say exactly when it happened or who the culprit was (obe mentioned Hal Roach Jr. '36' another Windell WIllkie's son, who never attended Culver although WIlkie's grandson grand.

uated from summer school this August). At this point, though it doesn't matter whether the incident took place or not. the story has passed into legedn, into the Culver Mthology.

another says

Hal Roach was a friend of Sam Medbourn's in 1936. Maybe he was in on it. Samuel Marion Medbourn and his roommate, Bruce Kixmiller. CMA Class of 1937. Whenever those two got together, through the years, they would regale us with the story. They put a pool ball in a cannon. When the cannon shot off at 6 a.m., it hit the hull of a large boat. The boat sank. I doubt if CMA memorialized it anywhere.

The boat might have been THE RODMAN.

Another much earlier prank of sinking boats by cadets was a Halloween prank in 1900