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Cicada, Stages of Conventionalization

Kilroy Was Here!

He’s engraved in stone in the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC – back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is an intrinsic part of American history and legend.

Anyone born between 1913 to about 1950, is very familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known….but everybody seemed to get into it. It was the fad of its time!

          At the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC

So who was Kilroy?

In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy….now a larger-than-life legend of just-ended World War II….offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.

Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had credible and verifiable evidence of his identity.

“Kilroy” was a 46-year old shipyard worker during World War II (1941-1945) who worked as a quality assurance checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts (a major shipbuilder for the United States Navy for a century until the 1980s).  

His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. (Rivets held ships together before the advent of modern welding techniques.) Riveters were on piece work wages….so they got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk (similar to crayon), so the rivets wouldn’t be counted more than once.

                                     A warship hull with rivets

When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would surreptitiously erase the mark. Later, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters!

One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about unusually high wages being “earned” by riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on. 

The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ”KILROY WAS HERE!“ in king-sized letters next to the check….and eventually added the sketch of the guy with the long nose peering over the fence….and that became part of the Kilroy message.

   Kilroy’s original shipyard inspection “trademark” during World War II

Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.

Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With World War II on in full swing, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection “trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.

His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over the European and the Pacific war zones.

Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo. 

To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.” As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.

As World War II wore on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!

Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always “already been” wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable. (It is said to now be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon by the American astronauts who walked there between 1969 and 1972.

In 1945, as World War II was ending, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Allied leaders Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference. It’s first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”

To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car….which he attached to the Kilroy home and used to provide living quarters for six of the family’s nine children….thereby solving what had become an acute housing crisis for the Kilroys.

                     The new addition to the Kilroy family home.

                                        *          *          *          *

And the tradition continues into the 21st century…

In 2011 outside the now-late-Osama Bin Laden’s hideaway house in Abbottabad, Pakistan….shortly after the al-Qaida-terrorist was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs. 

>>Note: The Kilroy graffiti on the southwest wall of the Bin Laden compound pictured above was real (not digitally altered with Microsoft Paint, as postulated by some). The entire compound was leveled in 2012 for redevelopment by a Pakistani company as an amusement park….and to avoid it becoming a shrine to Bin Laden’s nefarious memory.

                                         *          *          *          *

A personal note….

My Dad’s trademark signature on cards, letters and notes to my sisters and I for the first 50 or so years of our lives (until we lost him to cancer) was to add the image of “Kilroy” at the end. We kids never ceased to get a thrill out of this….even as we evolved into adulthood. 

To this day, the “Kilroy” image brings back a vivid image of my awesome Dad into my head….and my heart!

Dad: This one’s for you!

"I am the sun and moon and forever hungry." - Audre Lorde

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

Introduction of Sharon Patricia Holland's The Erotic Life of Racism

Transcript start:

Image #1: A few days after Tupac Shakur’s death in 1996, I pulled into a Safeway park- ing lot in Palo Alto, California, with my friend’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Danielle. We were listening to one of Shakur’s songs on the radio; because he was a hometown boy, the stations were playing his music around the clock-a kind of electromagnetic vigil, if you will. An older (but not elderly) woman with a grocery cart came to the driver’s side of my car and asked me to move my vehicle so that she could unload her groceries. The tone of her voice assumed fruition-it was not only a request but a demand that would surely be met. The Southerner in me would have been happy to help; the critic in me didn’t understand why she simply couldn’t put her groceries in on the other side where there were no other cars or potential impediments. I told the woman that I would gladly wait in my car until she unloaded her groceries—that way, there would be plenty of room for her to maneuver.

Image #2: While she did this, I continued to listen to Shakur’s music and talk with Danielle. We were “bonding,” and I was glad that she was talking to me about how Shakur’s death was affecting her and her classmates. When I noticed that the woman had completed her unloading, I got out and we walked behind her car toward the Safeway. What happened next has stayed with me as one of the defining moments of my life in Northern California. As we passed the right rear bumper of her car, she said with mustered indignation, “And to think I marched for you!” I was stunned at first- when something like this happens to you, you see the whole event in slow motion. I recovered and decided that I had two options: to walk away without a word or to confront the accusation-to model for Danielle how to handle with a modicum of grace what would surely be part of the fabric of her life as a black woman in the United States. I turned to the woman and said, “You didn’t march for me, you marched for yourself—and if you don’t know that, I can’t help you.”

When average people participate in racist acts, they demonstrate a pro- found misreading of the subjects they encounter. The scene related above dramatizes a host of racialized relations: the expectation that black women will cease a connection with their own families in order to respond to the needs of white persons; the comprehension of a refusal to do so as a criminal act; the need to subject black bodies to the rule of race; and the absolute denial of the connection between seemingly disparate peoples that the phrase “civil rights march” connotes. For that woman in the parking lot, the civil rights struggle was not about freedom for us all, it was about acquiring a kind of purchase on black life. I would be given the right

to participate in “democratic process” but the ability to exercise the autonomy inherent in such a right would be looked upon with disdain and, at times, outrage.

Image #3: The scene from the parking lot stays with me as if the woman and I were locked in a past that has tremendous purchase on my present. In my mind, we hover there touching one another with the lie of difference and non- relation balancing precariously between us-like the characters Rosa and Clytie at war on the dilapidated staircase in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a scene I explicate at some length in the conclusion of this book. The psychic violation of that moment in the parking lot haunts me still;