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| Kilroy Was Here! |
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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. He 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 th e 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
that 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 tha t 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 the war's end, "Kilroy" had been here, there, and
everywhere on the long haul to Berlin and Tokyo.
To the unfortunate 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 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
Arch De Triumphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon.)
And as the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely
sneak ed ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for
the 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.
The first person inside 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 it to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up a s a playhouse
in the Kilroy front yard in Halifax, Massachusetts.