Do you remember Kilroy?     


This is interesting. Great piece of history.


Anyone born in the twenties or mid thirties knew Kilroy. We didn't know why
but we had lapel pins with his nose hanging over the label and the top of
his face above his nose with his hands hanging over the label too. I
believe it was orange colored. No one knew why he was so well known but we
all joined in!


Kind of a war story - now we know! INTERESTING?~~~~


KILROY WAS HERE! WHO THE HECK WAS KILROY? In 1946 the American Transit
Association, through its radio program, "Speak to America," sponsored a
nationwide contest to find the REAL Kilroy, offering a prize of a real
trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine
article.


Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy
from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.


Kilroy was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a
checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around and
check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework and got
paid by the rivet.


Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed
lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. When Kilroy went off
duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector
would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double
pay for the riveters.


One day Kilroy's boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset
about all the wages being paid to riveters, and asked him to investigate.
It was then he realized what had been going on.


The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn't lend
themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to
stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his checkmark on each job he
inspected, but added KILROY WAS HERE in king-sized letters next to the
check, and eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose
peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message. Once he
did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.

Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with
paint. With war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast
that there wasn't time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy's inspection
"trademark" was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships
the yard produced. His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen,
because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South
Pacific. Before war's end, "Kilroy" had been here, there, and everywhere on
the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.


To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery;
all they knew for sure was that some jerk named Kilroy had "been there
first." As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they
landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.


Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always "already been" wherever GI's
went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places
imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the
underside of l'Arc De Triomphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon).


As the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely
sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain
for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first
GI's there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops
painting over the Kilroy logo! In 1945, an outhouse was built for the
exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam
conference. Its' first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide
(in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"


To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along
officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley
car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up
as a playhouse in the Kilroy front yard in Halifax , Massachusetts.


So, now you know!

LAST UPDATED 7/11/2010