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"Kilroy Was Here," right next to my Dad
by Beth Kane
When I was a kid, the ultimate in comfort food was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I wasn't too particular about the flavor of jelly, either. Kids in school thought I was pretty strange when I brought peanut butter and green mint jelly sandwiches in my lunch for more than a year. The absolute worst PB&J, however, was the one my father, Stan Irwin, found in his lunchbox one day.
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| Fore River Shipyard, Quincy, MA, 1952 |
Dad worked as a welder at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, during World War II, and used to eat lunch with his buddies right in the yard. He shocked them all the day he took a bite out of his sandwich and hurled it against the side of the Battleship Massachusetts (appropriately nicknamed "Big Mamie") they were working on. What he said is unprintable.
It seems my mother had run out of grape jelly and, rather than tell Dad, decided to substitute cranberry sauce hoping he wouldn't know the difference. Yum.
Dad used to talk about his boss, James J. Kilroy. It turns out (and I just discovered this) that this Kilroy is the same one known globally for the "Kilroy was Here" grafitti, and this is why:
Dad told me that welders made a great deal of money during the war. They were paid for each weld on a ship. Some guys cheated and, as I recall, put sawdust in the space before doing a proper weld. This was faster and made them money hand over fist. J.J. Kilroy was the supervisor. When he heard about it, he began checking the welds regularly and, at first, he wrote in chalk, "Kilroy was here." The men rubbed the chalk off, so Kilroy switched to a yellow crayon. When men got drafted from the shipyard and sent overseas, they left their calling card in graffiti, "Kilroy was here!"
(© Patrick A. Tillery) |
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During the war [Mr James J. Kilroy of Halifax, Massachusetts] was employed at the Bethlehem Steel Company’s Quincy shipyard, inspecting tanks, double bottoms and other parts of warships under construction. To satisfy superiors that he was performing his duties, Mr. Kilroy scribbled in yellow crayon ‘Kilroy was here’ on inspected work. Soon the phrase began to appear in various unrelated places, and Mr. Kilroy believes the 14,000 shipyard workers who entered the armed services were responsible for its subsequent world-wide use.
-- New York Times
December 24, 1946 |
Another story I have been trying to track down for years is about launching some of the ships from Fore River Shipyard by greasing the ways with bananas because petroleum products were costly and scarce during wartime. My mother says the local newspaper, The Quincy Patriot Ledger, used to print a warning several days before a launch because the water level would rise several feet on local streets like ours, Riverbank Road in North Weymouth. Our house was right at the beachfront.
Years later (1957), my friends and I used to collect great globs of yellow, waxy, grease on the beach following launches. The weather was very cold, and our parents would've killed us if they knew what we were up to. We threw all the grease into a huge metal bucket and melted it over a fire; then we plunged our arms up to the elbow, pulled it out fast and held it up in the frigid air. It felt like melted candle wax. It hurt like crazy, but you had to act like it was no big deal. Once the greasy wax hardened (which was quickly) we wriggled our arms out of the "cast" and chased each other all over the cobbled beach using the "casts" as scary claws.
We also used to play in a big foxhole that was dug on the hillside overlooking the beach. The military dug the foxhole during the World War II because Fore River was vital to the war effort. Apparently, an enemy submarine was spotted off the coast. I think the whole East Coast had the jitters.
Here are some good sites for more information about Kilroy:
http://www.KilroyWasHere.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
For the Battleship Massachusetts, visit
http://www.battleshipcove.org/bb59-history.htm
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