Vanilla Gorilla

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Kilroy was Here!

—–Original Message—–

Subject: Fw: Kilroy Was Here

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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?”

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.

And The Tradition
Continues…

EVEN Outside Osama Bin
Laden’s House!!!
Share This Bit Of Historic
Humor

With All
Your
Friends! :)

God Bless You World War II
Veterans!!!!

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