{"id":404,"date":"2012-05-06T14:19:37","date_gmt":"2012-05-06T13:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/?p=404"},"modified":"2012-05-06T14:20:52","modified_gmt":"2012-05-06T13:20:52","slug":"do-you-remember-kilroy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/?p=404","title":{"rendered":"Remember Kilroy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you remember Kilroy?<\/strong>
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A great piece of history.<\/div>\n
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Anyone born in the\u00a01920’s or mid-thirties or who grew up during the war years of the 1940’s knew Kilroy. We didn’t know why\u00a0but we had lapel pins with his nose hanging over the label and the top of\u00a0his face above his nose with his hands hanging over the label too. Some recall it was orange colored.<\/div>\n
No one knew why he was so well known but we all joined in!<\/p>\n
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KILROY WAS HERE! WHO THE HECK WAS KILROY?<\/div>\n
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In 1946 the American Transit\u00a0Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the REAL Kilroy, offering a prize of a real\u00a0trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the gennuine\u00a0article.<\/div>\n
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Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy\u00a0from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Kilroy was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a\u00a0checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around and\u00a0check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework and got\u00a0paid by the rivet.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed\u00a0\u00a0lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn’t be counted twice. When Kilroy went off\u00a0duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector\u00a0would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double\u00a0pay for the riveters.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset\u00a0about all the wages being paid to riveters, and asked him to investigate.\u00a0\u00a0It was then he realized what had been going on.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend\u00a0themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to\u00a0stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his checkmark on each job he\u00a0inspected, but added KILROY WAS HERE in king-sized letters next to the\u00a0check, and eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose\u00a0peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Once he\u00a0did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with\u00a0paint. With war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast\u00a0that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection\u00a0“trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships\u00a0the yard produced. His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen,\u00a0because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South\u00a0Pacific. Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, and everywhere on\u00a0the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery;\u00a0all they knew for sure was that some jerk named Kilroy had “been there\u00a0first.” As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they\u00a0landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always “already been” wherever GIs\u00a0went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places\u00a0imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the\u00a0\u00a0underside of l’Arc De Triomphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon).<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely\u00a0sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain\u00a0for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first\u00a0GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops\u00a0painting over the Kilroy logo! In 1945, an outhouse was built for the\u00a0exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam\u00a0conference. Its’ first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide
\n(in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along\u00a0officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley\u00a0car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up\u00a0as a playhouse in the Kilroy front yard in Halifax, Massachusetts.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
So, now you know!<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you remember Kilroy? A great piece of history. Anyone born in the\u00a01920’s or mid-thirties or who grew up during the war years of the 1940’s knew Kilroy. We didn’t know why\u00a0but we had lapel pins with his nose hanging … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406,"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions\/406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxnwolf.com\/locknload\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}