|
Off Topic Off Topic - General non-Corvette related discussion. |
|
Share | Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
07-28-2020, 5:38pm | #1 | ||||||
Latin American Goat Roper
Barn Stall Owner #101 Bantayan Kids '13
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Orange Park Florida
Posts: 60,687
Thanks: 32,879
Thanked 11,553 Times in 5,695 Posts
Gameroom Barn Bucks: $1138393
|
Kilroy was here......
For the older folks this will put a smile on your face from the time of our youth. For you young un’s, it's part of US history.
image image 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? image 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. image '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. image 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. image 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. image His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific. image 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. image 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. image 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 GIs there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo! image 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?" image 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 . image And The Tradition Continues... image EVEN Outside Osama Bin Laden's House!!! Share This Bit Of Historic Humor |
||||||
The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to mrvette For This Useful Post: |
07-28-2020, 5:51pm | #2 | ||||||
Barn Stall Owner #747-400
Join Date: Jul 2019
Location: The Bash, Perma
Posts: 109,372
Thanks: 93,395
Thanked 28,807 Times in 12,769 Posts
Gameroom Barn Bucks: $15031693
|
|
||||||
07-28-2020, 6:02pm | #3 | ||||||
Vette Barn Crew
Join Date: Mar 2020
Location: South of nowhere North of nothing
Posts: 733
Thanks: 341
Thanked 484 Times in 202 Posts
Gameroom Barn Bucks: $997010
|
|
||||||
|
|
Support the Barn: |
Download the Mobile App; |
Follow us on Facebook: |
||