Just Who Was Kilroy?
It is not clear just where the viral “Kilroy Was Here” tradition got started. Soon after WWII ended, the American Transit Association ran a contest to track down its origins. Scores stepped forward, to claim that they had been the originators. Ever since, there has been plenty of research on Kilroy. The likeliest theory traces the meme to James J. Kilroy, a Fore River Shipyard in Braintree, Massachusetts, inspector. That Kilroy supervised the work of riveters who were paid by the number of rivets installed. After they noted that number down, inspectors put chalk marks on the work done. However, some unscrupulous riveters erased the mark, in order to get paid twice for the same work. To avoid that, Kilroy wrote “Kilroy was here” in harder-to-erase crayon.
Kilroy’s crayon marks would normally have been painted over. Wartime was hectic, however, and in WWII, that didn’t always happen. Thousands of GIs came across “Kilroy was here” on ships built at Fore River Shipyard. None of them knew who Kilroy was, but they wondered, and that minor mystery birthed a viral meme tradition. The hardest to reach ship locations were the likeliest to go unpainted. The presence of the crayoned phrase in those spots enhanced Kilroy’s reputation for getting into impossible-to-reach places. When they got off their ships, many servicemen continued the gag about the mysterious Kilroy. They ran with it, and tagged every available surface to let the world know that Kilroy had been there. Somebody at some point added an easy-to-imitate drawing of a big-nosed cartoon character to the gag. The phrase and drawing combination took Kilroy from a widespread meme to major viral history.