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04 April 2013

KILROY WAS HERE

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He is engraved in stone in the National War Memorial in Washington, DCback in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII
generation, this will bring back memories. For you younger folks, it's a bit of
trivia that is a part of our American history.
Anyone born in 1913 to about 1950, is familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why
he was so well known- but everybody got into it, I even remember seeing
him around public places in the late 60s...

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So 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. He 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.

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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 check mark 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 the 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.
I was there!

His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they
picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific.

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Christmas 2013

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 someone
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
GIs 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 the 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?"

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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 yard in Halifax, Massachusetts.
And the tradition continues...

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TAU WarHistoryOnline K-Bear KilroyWasHere h/t Speedunque

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