Kilroy Was Here

1939

Date: 1939 onward · Place: Allied military installations, then ships, then everywhere · Figures: James J. Kilroy, shipyard inspector at Fore River Shipyard (Quincy, MA, leading attribution) · unknown wartime taggers worldwide · Tags: WWII, Proto-Meme 01. A Shipyard Inspector and a Phrase James J. Kilroy, riveter inspector at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, writes KILROY WAS HERE in yellow crayon on the hulls of completed ship sections, partly as a tracking signature so management knows the work is checked. The sections ship out across the Atlantic; the phrase travels with them. American soldiers find KILROY WAS HERE already scrawled inside tanks, on the walls of bombed-out bunkers, on the underside of bridges they thought they'd captured for the first time. Other origin candidates exist (a Sergeant Francis Kilroy of the Air Transport Command; British Mr Chad; Australian Foo Was Here). The James Kilroy attribution wins because the American Transit Association awarded him the credit in 1946. 02. The First Meme That Knew It Was a Meme By 1945 the phrase, often paired with the bald-head-with-fingers-over-wall doodle, appears at the Potsdam Conference (according to a Truman aide), on the underside of the torch of the Statue of Liberty, on Mount Everest in 1953 (Hillary's team finds it scratched into ice). Stalin reportedly asks who Kilroy is, twice. Dawkins won't coin the word for thirty years. But KILROY WAS HERE is, in retrospect, the first meme that EVERYBODY understood as a meme: a unit that propagates because propagating is the point, that exists to mark its own propagation. "KILROY WAS HERE." — everywhere, 1939 onward Sources • Charles Panati, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (1989) • American Transit Association award announcement (1946) • Wikipedia, Kilroy was here