Ferrari Mailing List: Fwd: KILROY?

[red5hilser (red5hilser]

When I was a kid, I had a plastic Kilroy that?was looking out of the top of my 
shirt pocket, nose and fingers on the outside. I've even heard of girls who had 
a?'KILROY WAS HERE' tatoo on their ass cheek. <g>

Ach, for the good olde days!? --? Yer pal, Bubba Kilroy




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Who the heck was KILROY??

KILROY WAS HERE!
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 sh ipyard 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 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 
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 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 
ra ng 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 placin g 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 
sneaked 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 
Roosvelt, 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 se t it up as a playhouse 
in the Kilroy front yard in Halifax, Massachusetts.

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