GRGR(10) - Kilroy Was Here
David Morris
fqmorris at hotmail.com
Wed Sep 29 08:37:28 CDT 1999
http://www.3dair.com/whois.htm
~WHO IS KILROY?~
Kilroy WAS Real!
James J. Kilroy.....lived in Boston, Massachusetts, served in the
Legislature and during World War II worked in a shipyard in Quincy where the
famous saying was born.
Kilroy checked and recorded the number of rivets that were driven by workers
who got paid by the number of rivets placed. At first, Kilroy would count a
block of rivets and use a chalk check mark to indicate that block had been
checked so the the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. However some riveters
would erase the chalk mark when Kilroy went off duty so that when a new
checker came along it would get counted twice and the riveters would get
paid twice.
Kilroy's boss noticed that riveters were getting paid a lot and wanted
Kilroy to find out what was going on. Once Kilroy discovered what the
riveters were doing, along with his chalk check mark he would put in large
crayoned letters, "Kilroy Was Here". The riveters from then on quit wiping
out his chalk marks.
Before a ship shipped out it was normally painted covering up the chalk
marks and Kilroy's inspection slogan. Ships were being built and sent out so
fast that there wasn't time to paint them. Millions of service men saw the
slogan on the outgoing ships and all they knew was that "Kilroy" had been
there first. Service men began placing the graffiti wherever the US Forces
landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived. Kilroy then became
the "Super-GI" who had always already been wherever the GI's went. The
sketch of a man peeking over a fence was added somewhere along the way by a
service man. In foreign lands, the slogan was often used as a code. 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 scrawled in the dust on the moon. An outhouse was
built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill for the
Potsdam Conference. The first person inside was Stalin, who emerged and
asked his aid (in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"
After the war, in 1946 the Transit Company of America held a contest
offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself
to be the "real" Kilroy. Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim,
but James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the
riveters to help prove his authenticity. James Kilroy won the prize of the
trolley car which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift to set up
in their front yard for a playhouse.~
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