Construction is quiet for the weekend as we celebrate our national holiday. All the tonka toys are quiet waiting to rumble again come Monday.
Looks like they managed to get the whole sewer line filled in before leaving Thursday night.
Our last dirt storm had some pretty strong winds that blew all the pine needles around. Landscaping crews have been busy picking up the loose debris to keep the park neat even in the summer.....knowing by the time it is cleaned up, we'll likely have another storm. All their work is deeply appreciated.
Our dedicated pickleball players take it upon themselves to keep the courts ready for play. Here's Larry Gray and John Hennessey with hoses and brushes in the action.
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| Photo by Avis Gray |
Over 20 players showed up at 6:00 a.m. for morning play. They certainly love the game.
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| Avis Gray & Steve Alexander posed for the camera. |
Why stay home to play cards when "Magic Mike" hits the box office. We were the first car load to arrive on opening day! We were ready for the action! :)
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Saturday, July 4
Today we were treated to a typical Independence Day cookout. Even Lisa Harold was wearing an apron and helping to serve. From Left to Right: Donna Cox, Kathleen Heckel, Lisa Harold, MaryAnn Brown. We had great big hamburgers with all the trimmings, cole slaw, french fries, and dessert. Thanks!
Our summer crowd seems to be growing as today over 80 tickets were sold for lunch!
Tables looked nice and festive.
Have a great SAFE weekend!
A bit of
history
Us older folks
remember him well, had even been party to inscribing on our school desks, books,
just anywhere at all.
He is engraved in
stone in the National War 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 you younger
folks, it's a bit of trivia that is a part of our American
history.
Anyone born in 1913
to about 1950, is familiar with
Kilroy.
No one knew why he
was so well known- but everybody seemed to get into
it.
In 1946 the
American Transit Association, through its radio
program,
"Speak to America
," sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real
Kilroy,
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 evidence of his
identity.
'Kilroy' was a
46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked
as
a checker at the
Fore River Shipyard in Quincy . His job was to go
around
and check on the
number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework
and
got paid by the
rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check
mark
in semi-waxed
lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted
twice.
When Kilroy went
off duty, the riveters would erase the
mark.
Later on, 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 all the wages being paid to
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
chap with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the
Kilroy message.
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 the war on,
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 Europe and the South Pacific.
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.
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 be atop Mt. Everest , the Statue of Liberty , the underside of The Arc de
Triomphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon.
As the war went 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!
In 1945, an
outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt,
Stalin,
And Churchill at
the Potsdam conference. Its' 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
gave to his nine
children as a Christmas gift and set it up as a playhouse
in
the Kilroy yard in
Halifax , Massachusetts .
And The
Tradition Continues...
EVEN Outside Osama
Bin Laden's House!!!
Share This Bit Of
Historic Humor
With All Your
Friends! :)
God Bless you World
War II Veterans!
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