Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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Sometime during the late 1940s, I had a job at Butler’s Restaurant. I got there in the morning, before it opened for business. I swept the floors, filled the soft drink cooler and things like that. I also kept an eye on the walls of the Men’s Room. It was pretty common to find graffiti there, and Tony Butler didn’t like that. He didn’t mind graffiti in the back room where teenagers danced and listened to music, but he wanted to keep the rest of his restaurant “graffiti-free.”
Most of the graffiti was just initials. Then there were a number of hearts with two sets of initials inside. I guess when some guys took a fancy to a young lady, they thought the best way to express their affection for her was to write their initials together, inside of a heart, on the walls of a public restroom. I never really understood that, but I saw it happen again and again.
Every now and then, I had to get rid of the graffiti. Tony kept an assortment of cleaners for this purpose in the basement, plus a can of paint to cover any resistant graffiti. It wasn’t easy to keep those walls graffiti-free, but I did the best I could.
One of the most interesting bits of graffiti was the “Kilroy was here” drawing, like the one shown here. For younger readers, those drawings were started during World War II, and were spread all over the world by American GIs. Then they were picked up by civilians, both kids and adults, and were everywhere, even for a year or so after the war ended.
I got rid of several of those drawings as part of my job. In the process, I made some interesting observations. For example, Tony thought those drawings were being made by the same person. But it seemed to me that they were being made by different people.
I think everyone drew Kilroy a little differently – maybe with a longer or wider nose. Or someone might add eyebrows, or several hairs on his head. In other words, those Kilroy drawings were like fingerprints. No two were exactly alike.
Another observation I made was that there never seemed to be more than one Kilroy drawing at a time on the walls. It was as if the graffiti artists just wanted to keep the Kilroy legend alive, and a single drawing would do that. There was no need to add another one.
Then one day there was a small, inconspicuous Kilroy drawing just above the towel dispenser. I asked Tony if I could leave it there to see if my Kilroy theory was valid. He said I could do that, and I think he was surprised to find that I was right. As long as that small Kilroy drawing was left on the wall, no new ones were added.
I kept that job for the rest of that school year, and I don’t think I ever had to take another of those Kilroy drawings off the walls. Tony was pleased. He didn’t give me a raise or anything like that, but he was pleased.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com