One afternoon in the spring of 1966, Frank Howard was cleaning up his Clemson office when he came across this big rock an alumnus picked up in Death Valley, California. The alumnus was S.C. Jones, a 1919 graduate of Clemson College. He gave the rock to Howard some years before as a gift, thinking it was pretty cool for Clemson to have a rock from the real Death Valley in Clemson’s Death Valley.
For years, Howard used the rock as a doorstop in his office over at Fike, until that faithful day in 1966.
“I didn’t know what to do with it,” Howard said in his 1990 book Howard: The Clemson Legend.