Mike Silver, Bluffton

Well-done fraternity pranks were sometimes the most clever.

In the early 1960s, in a wonderful fraternity at the University of Missouri, I witnessed a terrific prank that served a purpose.

On Sundays, the fraternity house was dark, meaning no meals were served. It was a day to give the staff off and a chance for the brothers to share the camaraderie of some of the local eating establishments.

One of the guys was, let’s say, extraordinarily frugal. His mother would send him all sorts of canned goods which he kept on his closet shelf in an extraordinary filing fashion. They were in alphabetical order — alphabet vegetable soup, beef stew, SpaghettiOs, etc. He had a one-burner hot plate and a pot and spent Sunday nights by himself, eating his favorite foods from the cans he meticulously set up.

We wanted to get him out and enjoy dinner with the rest of us. So, of course, we went to the major prankster in the house to solve the problem. One Sunday afternoon, before dinner, he went into our frugal friend’s room, mixed up all the cans on the shelf and took off each and every label. He marked nothing. In those days all the cans looked exactly alike and it would be impossible for anyone to know whether he was opening split pea soup or baked beans.

I'll never forget our fraternity brother's face when he went to his closet storehouse that Sunday night (we were all visiting his roommate), nor will I forget the cry he yelled out, and then quietly said, "What are we waiting for, let’s go to dinner."

After all these years, I don't know what became of my "canned goods brother." However the great prankster became a U.S. attorney, and later an appellate judge for the State of Missouri.