NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. III, No. 4, Winter 1947

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FOLKLORE FROM G.I. JOE
Agnes Nolan Underwood

THE TITLE of my article brings me smack in the middle of my first classification for folklore of World War II— “Characters Who Were Born in World War II.” First in that classification is Joe. The American soldier called his buddy Joe; he called anyone he met, this side of the ocean or that, Joe. G.I. of course stands for Government Issue. They had government- issue clothes, food, and shelter, so they became G.I. Joes. Clare Booth Luce gave G.I. Joe a public christening, but he was more than an active child at that time. Incidentally, Joe’s pal, G.I. Jim, introduced in that same speech, died a-borning. In the Navy, it’s Mac.

Kilroy was the most ubiquitous character of the war. There is a folk hero for you—he was everywhere, and there first. Although Kilroy seems to have spent most of his time in men’s rooms (he even wrote on the wall in the marble-tiled room reserved for VIPs, very important personages, at Potsdam, Germany, during the postwar meeting of the Big Three, and amazed Stalin no end), he managed to reach the most impossible and varied places. He was at the base of the Marco Polo Bridge in China, he was first in hundreds of newly won French towns, and on the top of the Owen Stanley Mountains of New Guinea. He was there when the atom bomb exploded at Bikini. No one knows who Kilroy is or when he started operating. He kicked up such a fuss that last September the Adjutant General’s office announced that Kilroy doesn’t exist, as far as they are concerned. A radio contest sponsored by the American Transit Association brought forth thousands of accounts of Kilroy’s beginning and awarded two trolley cars as prizes. The account favored by the Stars and Stripes is that he was an AAF sergeant who was trying to catch up with his outfit and recorded his presence in all the places where he just missed them....

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