Friday, March 5, 2010

Killroy was here





Okay, so; funny story. This is true, btw.
During World War two, a shipyard inspection worker whose last name was Kilroy checked the riveting work of the builders. Now, builders were payed by the number of rivets they put in, and sometimes they would do a line of rivets and stop, then someone else would continue it for them later. Since they got payed for the number of rivets, though, the person who continued the line would tell Kilroy that he had done more work than he actually had. In order to stop this, Kilroy painted a line where the last person had finished riveting, so that people couldn't cheat. He would also paint, above the line, "Kilroy was here".
Now, during WWII, ships were being pumped out so fast there wasn't even time to paint them, so Kilroy's little drawing's were still there when the ships were full of troops. The troops marveled at where this "Kilroy" guy had been-who they assumed was another bored troop en route-putting graffiti in places in the ship that weren't even accessible, like the inside of a bulkhead door! How was this guy doing it!? They began to write the same message themselves, and made it into a game to find places nobody would look and write that. Thus the Kilroy epidemic began. Soldiers painted it on tanks, on planes, on walls, and everywhere else.
The Kilroy fad was then expanded into a little cartoon man--some accounts say the cartoon (a head with a bulbous nose peering over a wall) was painted by the real Kilroy in the the first place, along with his name, on the riveters work, as if to say, "I'm watching you".
Other reports say that the cartoon was from a newspaper comic at the time, making fun of a military report in which the troops were complaining to their leader, "Wot, no coffee? Wot, no fags (cigarettes)? Wot, no sugar?". The leader got pissed because there was nothing he could do about it, and told them he was going to punish them for 28 days if they didn't shut up. Come night, he returned to his quarters and found a note that said, "Wot, only 28 days?". Then people mixed the newspaper cartoon with the already infamous "Kilroy was here" and thus was born the mix of the two.
Now old WWII Kilroy "graffiti" is being discovered everywhere. People take apart old safes and, Oh my god! kilroy was here! In 1972 they took apart this one vault in fort Knox, which hadn't been touched since 1937, when it had been filled to the brim with gold bars--and wouldn'cha know it, the vault had been riveted on the inside, and bam! Kilroy was here! They were like, 'Unless this guy trained a snake with a peice of chalk, he was actually here in 1937!'
I think the best thing about Kilroy is that, like Ol' Uncle Sam, he unwittingly got turned into an American idol (not a singer, lol)
Oh, and if you're wondering about Uncle Sam--hundreds of years ago, there was a man named Samuel, and he owned a pork business. Now, the salted pork was put in barrels and sold the the US Army for food rations. The name of the Pork Company was "Uncle Sam's Pork" or something to that affect-- and on each barrel the company name was stamped--"Uncle Sam". Now, 'Uncle Sam', starts with the same letters of 'United States', and sometimes they would be put in initials, and then they got confused. The soldiers who ate the pork and saw the barrels stamped with "Uncles Sam" or "US", started to think 'Uncle Sam' and The 'United States' were synonymous, and thus was borne the legend of Uncle Sam, the Symbol of America!