29. Will the Real Kilroy Please Stand Up?
The origins of “Kilroy was here” are murky. Soon after the end of WWII, the American Transit Association ran a contest to track down just how the meme had started. Dozens of candidates stepped forward, to claim that they had originated the viral phrase and doodle. Over the years, there has been plenty of research and historic sleuthing on Kilroy. The most credible theory traces the meme to James J. Kilroy, an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard in Braintree, Massachusetts. He oversaw the work of riveters, who were paid by how many rivets they had installed. After they noted down the number of rivets, inspectors usually put a chalk mark on the work done. However, some unscrupulous riveters erased the mark, in order to get paid twice for the same work. So Kilroy began to write “Kilroy was here” in harder-to-erase crayons.
Inspector Kilroy’s crayon mark would normally have been painted over, but in the mad rush of WWII, such niceties were often ignored. Thousands of American servicemen thus came across “Kilroy was here” on ships built at Fore River Shipyard. They had no clue who Kilroy was, and from that minor mystery, a viral meme was born. Especially hard-to-reach ship locations were the likeliest to go unpainted, and the presence of the phrase in those inaccessible spots enhanced Kilroy’s reputation for getting into impossible-to-reach places. Once they disembarked, many GIs continued the gag about the mysterious Kilroy, ran with it, and tagged every available surface to let the world know that Kilroy had been there. At some point, somebody added an easy-to-imitate drawing of a big-nosed cartoon character to the gag. That combination of phrase and doodle took Kilroy from a widespread meme to major viral history.
