Kilroy was here
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>>> He is engraved in stone in the National War Memorial in Washington, DC,
>>> back 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 seemed to get into it.
>>> So who was Kilroy?
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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.
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>>> '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.
>>> Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through
>>> and count the rivets a second time,
>>> resulting in double pay for the riveters.
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>>> 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.
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>>> 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.
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>>> 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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>>> 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.
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>>> 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.
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>>> 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!
>>>
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>>>
>>> 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.
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>>> And The Tradition Continues...
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>>> EVEN Outside Osama Bin Ladin's House!!!
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>>> Share This Bit Of Historic Humor
>>> With All Your Friends!
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