[Ads-l] "Who was Kilroy?" June 26, 1945 (in-print antedating?)

MULLINS, WILLIAM D (Bill) CIV USARMY DEVCOM AVMC (USA) 0000099bab68be9a-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Thu Mar 25 21:17:46 UTC 2021


Is Texacts online?  Where?

This page:

https://ufdc.ufl.edu/fdnl1

used to include a number of WW2 Army Air Corp base newspapers, but the seem to have moved (or else they are on a different page that I can't find right now).  I went through them looking for "kilroy" a few years ago, but searching the ADS-L archives doesn't show that I reported anything relevant.  Which means either that:
I didn't find anything relevant, or
The search feature for the ADS-L archives is not very good.

Possibly both.


________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Shapiro, Fred [fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 8:23 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Who was Kilroy?" June 26, 1945 (in-print antedating?)


----

The forthcoming New Yale Book of Quotations notes that the Texacts newspaper of the Sheppard Field Army base in Texas posed the question "Who is Kilroy?" in its April 21, 1945 issue.

Fred Shapiro


________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 9:10 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: "Who was Kilroy?" June 26, 1945 (in-print antedating?)

"Who is Kilroy?"
Sgt. Roger Angell
Google Books

SG
________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 8:50 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: "Who was Kilroy?" June 26, 1945 (in-print antedating?)

A story by Rogel Angell (likely (?) the later-famous baseball writer, who was in the Army Air Forces), Brief vol. 2, no. 30 (title page missing, but by sequence)   page 18/1 [my elipses] [also in later issues of this title, including a letter to editor speculation, July 17 p. 2/3]:

Who is Kilroy?
Kilroy is the guy who just stepped out of the orderly room as you came in. Kilroy was in the latrine....latest AAF gag. ....  [Kilroy 4x]... "Kilroy ditched here." Kilroy will be here any day, but you won't see him.

Stephen Goranson


PS On "in-print":
Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (NY, 1947) page 210 reports seeing, near Christmastime 1944:

On the black, charred walls of an abandoned farm [near Bastogne] scrawled in white chalk, was the legend of McAuliffe's GI's: KILROY WAS STUCK HERE.




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