'Der Viener Schlinger': The meat cannon that launched 20k hot dogs

I didn’t make the cut for the Husker drumline. I failed in my freshman tryout to be Lil’ Red. But today, a quarter-century after college, I am finally entering the inner circle of Huskerdom. I have risen from among the red-and-white plebes to become a powerful paladin of Husker Nation. From behind Section 7’s concrete pillar to the skyboxes. I am about to shoot Der Viener Schlinger.

It’s the first quarter of the North Dakota game, and I’m walking out of the Valentino’s-smelling bowels of Memorial Stadium onto the northeast corner of Tom Osborne Field.

My hot dog shooting guide, Tim Eliker, is sporting a seizure-inducing T-shirt that looks like Picasso went to work on the Maryland state flag. He hands me the launcher, which feels remarkably light.

Eliker’s guiding hand keeps it nearly perpendicular to the ground, for fear I’ll commit unintentional violence. 

I pull the trigger – effortlessly, with nearly zero recoil – and a Fairbury brand hot dog fires so high that it escapes the beam spread of Memorial’s tall lights. 

And then it comes nearly straight down, thudding not six feet in front of me. 

Without a word, Eliker shoves the same dog back into the gun as if nothing happened. I aim and fire again. 

This time, I hit the East Stadium upper deck.

Thirty years ago this season, a child was conceived in Nebraska — a baby that was a perfectly legal rocket propeller, which this season made its 200th appearance at Memorial Stadium. It has become the odd pride of Nebraska, one of our most cherished institutions: Der Viener Schlinger, the world’s first handheld hot dog launcher.

Birth of The Schlinger

On Sept. 30, 1996, Marc Roode was at home in Fairbury watching his Dallas Cowboys battle the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football when he noticed some strange, decidedly non-pigskin-related commotion on the Veterans Stadium sideline. 

The Phillie Phanatic — the taxonomically cryptic mascot of the city’s baseball team — was firing into the stands what looked like hot dogs out of some contraption rigged to a four-wheeler. As marketing director for the parent company of Fairbury Brand Meats, Roode immediately saw how such a device could help promote his golden child: the famous bright red hot dog. 

He got in touch with the improbably named Buckeye Epstein, a sports marketer in Texas who had bought the rights to the launcher after it had debuted at the Phillies’ opening day game that April. Epstein sold Roode a launcher, which arrived in Nebraska the following spring.

Tom Osborne personally blessed the inclusion of Der Viener Schlinger at Husker games, though he didn’t want it on the field.

When the University of Nebraska declined to allow an ATV into Memorial Stadium, Roode had to retrofit a two-wheel commercial dolly to haul the CO2 supply tank and the launcher itself. The shooter would hold it with two hands – à la the Libyans in Back to the Future. 

Roode realized he would need someone with significant strength to handle the frank-flinging cannon. So in the summer of 1997, in the parking lot of the Super Saver at 27th and Cornhusker in Lincoln, he met up with Conrad Good, who fittingly worked at aerospace firm General Dynamics.

Good’s size was undefined yet never in doubt. Roode told me that years later he said to Good, “I’ve got you listed in our roster at 6’7,” 350. All he said was, ‘350 won’t touch it.’” Good became Fairbury’s man in Memorial, the shooter for the ’97 opener against Akron and for the next 18 seasons. 

“I had some proud moments in that stadium,” Good told me. 

Due to the kids who followed him around the stadium, he likened his service to that of the Pied Piper, the flautist of German myth. Good said he “hung his weenie up” in 2015 due to neuropathy-induced balance problems. “I was wearing myself out … It was just time for me to step back.” 

Eliker, his Lincoln-born apprentice, took over. Both could be identified by their enormous size and their trademark butcher’s frocks – often mistaken for lab coats – an idea from Fairbury’s advertising agency. 

“They use those coats in the USDA in the meat lockers to keep warm,” Eliker said. “We wear them during the winter. They do a good job of blocking the wind.” Good added, “They definitely made us stand out. You could see who we were from a long ways away.” 

On social media, Eliker is varyingly referred to as “Mr. Hot Dog Man,” “Frank Furt,” the “Weiner Winger,” “Weiner Meister,” and “Baron Von Viener Schlinger.”

Eliker’s gameday is as rite-filled as a Carthusian monk’s. His first stop is the downtown Lincoln Embassy Suites, where he launches 50 dogs starting at least four hours before game time. Then he always pulls up at the Marriott Courtyard tailgate party, where he poses for photos and eats his pregame meal but doesn’t actually shoot the schlinger. 

A minimum of one hour before kickoff, he arrives at Memorial to prepare the 100 dogs he’ll launch during the game. 

After the first two drives, he starts launching in the stadium’s northeast corner. Then he begins to circle the field, arriving in the second quarter at the southwest corner where the opponents’ sliver of fans is shimmed in between the scarlet and cream. He rests at halftime then is back out for the third quarter to make sure he has covered the entire oval of stands.

Eliker and Good have also fired Der Viener Schlinger at Husker baseball and volleyball games, Lincoln Stars and Omaha Lancers hockey games and minor league baseball games. They have fired it in Eagle (sprint car races), Kearney (hockey), Minneapolis (pond hockey), North Platte (North Platte Days) and Seward’s Fourth of July parade.

They have fired it at Ribfest, a GermanFest and the Nebraska Cattleman’s Ball. They fired it at one funeral.

At the beginning, Schlingermania swept the state. 

“We got the craziest requests for this thing,” Roode told me. “People were calling us offering us ridiculous amounts of money to take it to their kids’ birthday parties.” 

Ready, aim, frankfurter

Roode initially prepared a hot dog by wrapping it in foil, sealing it into a Ziploc bag then cutting a small hole in the bag so it “wouldn’t hold air and it would be more aerodynamic,” Roode said. “As it would come out of that tube, the Ziploc bag would open up to its normal size and it would just kind of flutter because it created so much wind resistance.” 

But you couldn’t aim and fire with any precision, Eliker told me.

Then, at a Husker volleyball match in 1997, civil engineering professor Rollin Hotchkiss looked on disapprovingly as a hot dog flew from Good’s hip across the court into the stands. Hotchkiss noticed significant drag. “It looked like an opportunity,” he told the Daily Nebraskan. He suggested taping down both Ziploc corners – a tweak Eliker still employs today. Then about 170 UNL engineering students embarked on a four-week project to improve Der Viener Schlinger’s performance. One of the finalists was an industrial slingshot made of surgical rubber. Another was a riff on a bow and arrow. At a Cook Pavilion showdown, the two winning teams, which both used compressed gas like the OG schlinger, shot dogs 77 and 80 yards, blowing the original’s record of 47 yards out of the FieldTurf. Those freshmen and sophomores contributed two key permanent changes to Der Viener Schlinger: They increased the CO2 tube’s diameter and shortened its length.

Changes are rare: Only five Der Viener Schlingers have ever existed. Roode hired a Beatrice firm to make a second gun. He and a UNL grad student also reverse engineered a “carbon copy” of the original gun, a self-contained contraption that would allow the operator to wear a CO2 canister in a backpack. Alas: “It was quite awkward and didn’t work wonderfully,” Roode said. 

Wimmer’s, which bought Fairbury in 2004, didn’t commission any, but Land O’Frost, which in turn swallowed up Wimmer’s in 2012, had two new Schlinger cousins made to promote its Ambassador Meats in Minnesota and Wimmer’s hot dogs in Iowa.

The 3.5-foot-long Der Viener Schlinger 1.0 could send a hot dog at 70 mph to a distance of around 150 feet. The current version I shot during the North Dakota game is six feet long and weighs 20 pounds. It can fire a 2.67-ounce Fairbury Tomboy at 90 mph from Tom Osborne Field in any direction – even over the 165-foot-high skyboxes. 

Over the course of an hour, as the first quarter became the second quarter and as the second quarter became the third, I butted in front of hopeful children waiting dutifully for their chance to shoot the Schlinger. I schlung hot dogs into the higher rows of the East Stadium. I fired dogs at people sitting in the expensive seats at midfield.

A few outstretched hands caught them and held them aloft in celebration. A few outstretched hands missed, and the dogs hammered concrete and skittered away with fans in pursuit.

A bullet exits a Colt .45 at around 860 feet per second. That’s only about six times as fast as the muzzle velocity of a hot dog leaving the barrel of Der Viener Schlinger.

Given that Good and Eliker have launched 25 dogs per quarter at every Husker home game since the Der Viener Schlinger debut, more than 20,000 hot dogs have sailed from their barrel toward outstretched Husker hands – and that’s just in Memorial alone.

Yours truly is just the latest celebrity in a long line of famous people who have shot Der Viener Schlinger: Bill Murray, Warren Buffett, Adam Devine, Larry the Cable Guy, Tommy Lee, Vince Gill, Alex Gordon, Gov. Ben Nelson, Gov. Mike Johanns, Johnny Rodgers, Rich Glover, Mike Rozier, Irving Fryar and Dean Steinkuhler. Eliker has been quite catholic in allowing others to shoot: “Anybody and everybody anywhere, from kids to adults, Herbie and Lil’ Red and other teams mascots and cheerleaders … If Ohio State comes, that’s all they talk about for a week: ‘We get to shoot the hot dog machine!’”

Naming the cannon 

The launcher got its name in the leadup to the 1997 season, when Fairbury held a contest on Lincoln’s Broadcast Media radio stations to name the cannon. Of the more than 1,000 submissions, four finalists received free tickets to attend the Huskers’ home opener, where Fairbury would introduce its launcher to Nebraska’s makeshift third-largest city. The finalists: Dog in a Bun Gun, The Doginator, Master Blaster and Der Viener Schlinger. Lincoln’s Rod Leber, then a construction testing lab manager who sat in Row 76 of the north stands, had come up with the winning name. He told me he “had taken German in college … and I have a lot of German background, so it just popped into my mind.”

In the late 1990s, Germans for Nebraska, a Husker fan group of German heritage, happened to sit in the lower rows above the south end zone, where Roode happened to be standing when the crowd made its choice: Loudest cheer wins. “It was deafening,” Roode added. “It wasn’t even a contest.”

Leber’s reward – outside of being immortalized as a pivotal figure in one of college football’s most cherished traditions – was to get to shoot a hot dog at a target in the stands. He missed.

Der Viener Schlinger seems meant to sound vaguely European – Häagen-Dazs’s hot dog cannon counterpart. But it doesn’t translate as you might expect. 

In German, “der” means “the.” “Wiener” means “of Vienna (Austria).” Although the English “to sling” probably traces back to Old Norse’s “slynja,” meaning “to hurl,” the German verb “shlingen” means “to wolf or scarf down,” as in food. So I guess I myself was an actual wienerschlinger at last year’s Michigan State game after I snaffled a foiled Fairbury Eliker happened to slynja onto the seat right in front of me. 

When he was a standup comic in Los Angeles, Omapod host Tony Bock used to do a bit about the name. “Just saying ‘Der Viener Schlinger’ on a comedy stage gets a laugh, whether you’re in Nebraska or not,” he told me. “There’s something quintessentially Nebraskan about mustering the courage to solve the problem we faced before the advent of this invention: the inability to ‘schling’ the wieners.”

Beware of flying sausage

Ambulance-chasing lawyers, overprotective parents and “A Christmas Story” fans are no doubt thinking about the danger of playing sausage archery in fan-filled stadiums. In 2018, the Phillies issued a formal apology after 58-year-old Kathy McVay was hit in the face by a dog and hospitalized. 

In 2008, while attending his 176th Kansas City Royals game, John Coomer was staring at the scoreboard when he was hit in the face by a hot dog shot by mascot Sluggerrr. After learning his retina was detached, Coomer sued the Royals. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled in his favor, finding that line drives of propelled pellets of processed protein are not “an inherent part of the game.” 

Today’s sports fan seems even more likely to be distracted by doomscrooling, kiss cams or booze (now sold in Memorial Stadium!), making it a minor miracle that more ocular or rhinoplasty scandals haven’t occurred. 

Team Der Viener Schlinger does its best to keep all fans’ retinas fully attached. Good said he never even saw “a bloody lip,” adding that the worst incident was that “one lady got hit in the face … Her husband threw the hot dog back at us.” “We try not to hurt anybody; That’s not the point,” Eliker told me, although he admits to unintentionally “knocking a beer out of a guy’s hand” last season. 

A launched hot dog once hit Husker radio analyst Matt Davison in the chest while he was sitting in the press box, shattering the sunglasses hanging from his polo. “I’ve never been hit that hard in my life, even during my playing career,” he told me.

Safety, or at least clothing safety, is also why Der Viener Schlinger frankfurters fly in their foil condiment-free. At first, they were accompanied by one ketchup and one mustard packet. 

It worked fine until a hot dog left the tube and “just exploded,” Roode said. “All we saw was hot dog, bun, and Ziploc bag dust flying through the air.” 

When the hot dog hit the man who caught it, condiments splattered “all over his real nice new Husker gear,” Good said.

The next Monday morning, Roode got a call at his office. It was the gentleman from western Nebraska, calling to complain that the condiments had stained his clothes. They were worth $175, and the Fairbury hot dog munitions overlords needed to replace them. 

Thus did Der Viener Schlinger permanently enter its naked dog era.

Der Viener Schlinger has shot non-sausage projectiles, occasionally firing T-shirts and miniature footballs. But surprisingly, no Runza has ever been inside Der Viener Schlinger’s barrel. 

The problem: It doesn’t quite fit. “Our sandwich is a slightly different shape, and to get that thing to work you had to really make it a hot dog shape and really wrap it up,” Runza spokesperson Becky Perrett told me. 

We could just be scratching the surface of potential projectiles. On Omapod, Bock noted that one of the University of Nebraska regents “proposed that fans be allowed to be buried in Memorial Stadium … Haven’t there been enough letdowns at Memorial? … Can you just imagine the ashes being distributed to the family by Der Viener Schlinger? ‘Kid — go deep!’”

Hot dogs past, future and present

You may wonder how hot dogs headed to hungry Huskers prior to the Schlingerian Age. In addition to Memorial’s more milquetoast vendors, the idiosyncratic, tam-sporting P. Stephen Potter famously walked the sidelines and whizzed wieners into the stands using only the 50-odd muscles in his right arm. A Gothenburg lawyer during the workweek, for 36 years the ponytailed Potter was a gameday fixture, accurate to 40 rows up — farther than the first Der Viener Schlinger could hit. “He was a dead eye with those hot dogs,” Good said. “He threw it right to ’em.” 

Roode remembers both Potter’s precision and persnickityness: Fairbury included in the ’97 Akron game program a foldout bullseye poster featuring a red F in the center at which Good could aim. 

“Potter that first game comes down to me and Conrad on the sideline and hands me four of these targets … Hot dogs at that time were $2, and he wanted $8 for the four hot dogs he had given away for (having hit) those four targets;” Roode told me. “He was pretty irate, so I reached into my wallet and gave him a ten-dollar bill.” 

The current master of the Schlinger, Eliker, has no plans to retire anytime soon, but Husker Nation may be in for a succession crisis when he does. Thirty-four-year-old Bradley Henderson has been apprenticing since 2011 and is the heir apparent. But it may be unwise to count out hot dog nepo baby Ryker Eliker, who though only 9 has been helping his father for years. “He shoots it all the time,” his proud father says.

I hope that by the time the torch passes, Memorial Stadium will have hosted the world’s first Hot Dog Launcher Olympics, especially since neither Roode nor Good nor Eliker has ever seen a shoot-off in person. 

Land O’Frost Brand Manager Toni Kackery called a competition “a fun idea (that) speaks to the enthusiasm fans have for these traditions. Fairbury is always interested in memorable ways to engage with consumers.” 

Good could envision the logistics right away: “That could happen at a halftime down in the far end zone.” But Eliker was skeptical the athletic department would OK it: “They’re pretty sacred about that field.” 

Deputy Athletic Director Brandon Meier wouldn’t commit, only telling me, “Other teams have tried to replicate it, but there is only one Der Viener Schlinger!” 

“It would be amazing,” Roode said. “I would have to figure out a way to make sure I got my fanny there to see it.” 

I will also be sure to attend, as I now have been initiated in the sacred rites of the art of schlinging. That night of my virgin experience, after launching eight or nine dogs, I was getting cocky and wanted to call my shot. I knew a friend was in the 99th row of the north stands, so we taped a dog extra tight – what Eliker calls a “bullet.” 

I aimed just to the right of the Jumbotron at the words “Zach Wiegert” and I fired. The hot dog flew clean out of the stadium. 

Although Nebraska fans might not put it exactly this way, something about Husker Nation is transcendental.

I think deep down, they know what I’m talking about: Transcendental is unbridled joy on a grown man’s face as he stands on hallowed ground, surrounded by his countrymen, watching the parabola of a tiny time capsule leave the Sea of Red out into the blackness of the night. As he watches pigs fly.