Well I'll be dipped in #*%

[Dragstews]

Friend drop by ... We was talking about everything under the sun and got to talking about welding.. And out of the blue I said Kilroy had his name all over the world cause he was a ship builder ... He jumps up and went out to his truck and came back in with this ...





Said his Dad got it at Coney Island NY in the late 40's ...

Dang near fell over .. !!!

[JakeF]

Haha!! That's great!

[Dragstews]

Kilroy was here

American meme that became popular during World War II, typically seen in graffiti. Its origin is debated, but the phrase and the distinctive accompanying doodle became associated with GIs in the 1940s: a bald-headed man (sometimes depicted as having a few hairs) with a prominent nose peeking over a wall with his fingers clutching the wall.



"Kilroy" was the American equivalent of the Australian Foo was here which originated during World War I. "Mr Chad" or just "Chad" was the version that became popular in the United Kingdom. The character of Chad may have been derived from a British cartoonist in 1938, possibly pre-dating "Kilroy was here". According to Dave Wilton, "Some time during the war, Chad and Kilroy met, and in the spirit of Allied unity merged, with the British drawing appearing over the American phrase." Other names for the character include Smoe, Clem, Flywheel, Private Snoops, Overby, The Jeep, and Sapo.

According to Charles Panati, "The outrageousness of the graffiti was not so much what it said, but where it turned up." It is not known if there was an actual person named Kilroy who inspired the graffiti, although there have been claims over the years.




The vast majority of you World War II vets are very familiar with the phrase "Kilroy Was Here" found written just about everywhere on every piece of equipment from Tokyo to Berlin. Quite a few Korean War vets saw it and even some Vietnam vets went through the "Kilroy Was Here" episode. Did you ever wonder how it all got started?

Kilroy was a 46-year old shipyard worker from Halifax, Massachusetts and, during the war, he worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in nearby Quincy. His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piece-work and got paid by the rivet. Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. When he 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 chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but he added "Kilroy Was Here" in king-size letters next to the check. Once he did that , the riveters stopped wiping 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 rang 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. Along the way, someone added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence, and that became part of the Kilroy message.

To the unfortunate troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery — all they knew for sure was that he 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 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 GIs 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?."

How did we find out who the real "Kilroy" was? 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 James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters to help prove his authenticity, and won the trolley car, which he gave it to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up in the Kilroy front yard for a playhouse.

Below, one of the WW II era's most popular comic figurines: a pregnant girl standing on a pedestal bearing the legend "Kilroy Was Here."



Yup, I would say he was ... !!! Hahaha

[Bbqbiker]

I’m a couple towns over from Halifax and I’m gonna go and look for someone’s house with the trolley in the front yard

[hillcat]

I was a shipfitter at Quincy shipyard when I was a young man.
Some still wrote that Gilroy graffiti on bulkheads with soapstone pencils.

[DustyDave]

Probably started by an radio tech this was the old schematic for a band pass filter.

Dusty

[OleDirtyDoc]

Friend drop by ... We was talking about everything under the sun and got to talking about welding.. And out of the blue I said Kilroy had his name all over the world cause he was a ship builder ... He jumps up and went out to his truck and came back in with this ...





Said his Dad got it at Coney Island NY in the late 40's ...

Dang near fell over .. !!!

That is awesome