Kilroy WAS Real!

James J. Kilroy.....lived in Boston, Massachusetts, served in the Legislature and during World War II worked in a shipyard in Quincy where the famous saying was born.

Kilroy checked and recorded the number of rivets that were driven by workers who got paid by the number of rivets placed. At first, Kilroy would count a block of rivets and use a chalk check mark to indicate that block had been checked so the the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. However some riveters would erase the chalk mark when Kilroy went off duty so that when a new checker came along it would get counted twice and the riveters would get paid twice.

Kilroy's boss noticed that riveters were getting paid a lot and wanted Kilroy to find out what was going on. Once Kilroy discovered what the riveters were doing, along with his chalk check mark he would put in large crayoned letters, "Kilroy Was Here". The riveters from then on quit wiping out his chalk marks.

Before a ship shipped out it was normally painted covering up the chalk marks and Kilroy's inspection slogan. Ships were being built and sent out so fast that there wasn't time to paint them. Millions of service men saw the slogan on the outgoing ships and all they knew was that "Kilroy" had been there first. Service men began placing the graffiti wherever the US Forces landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived. Kilroy then became the "Super-GI" who had always already been wherever the GI's went. The sketch of a man peeking over a fence was added somewhere along the way by a service man. In foreign lands, the slogan was often used as a code. 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 scrawled in the dust on the moon. An outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill for the Potsdam Conference. The first person inside was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aid (in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"

After the war, in 1946 the Transit Company of America held a contest offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the "real" Kilroy. 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. James Kilroy won the prize of the trolley car which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift to set up in their front yard for a playhouse.