Kilroy Was Here

Jim Stone and others in Science class c 1964Jim Stone and a couple of his buddies are committing science at Central High School. There are all kinds of impressive computations and chemical formulas scrawled on the chalkboard. Jim appears to be singeing the hair on his arm with the flame of a Bunsen burner.

You can click on the photos to make them larger.

Working the slide rule

Jim Stone and others in Science class c 1964Jim uses his slide rule to calculate the number of hairs burned off his arm in the previous photo.

By the way I looked up “slide rule” to see if it was one word or two and discovered that slide rules (two words, by the way) were pretty much killed off by the electronic scientific calculator by 1974.

I love the Kilroy Was Here face on the bottom left of the board behind Jim.

8 Replies to “Kilroy Was Here”

  1. Wasn’t David Stubbs the asst Mgr at town
    plaza cinema for many years? Can’t tell by picture
    But doesn’t look like him.

  2. Ralph Fry was the creator of Ralphius Oxide which he used to share with the whole Boy Scout troop 13 on the ride to summer camp inside my dad’s Thames Van. There is no doubt the person pictured above is the before said creator.

  3. Did Ralphius Oxide smell any thing like rotten eggs Magnum PU Hopkins? If so….. you must have carried that stuff around in your pocket a lot.

  4. My father-in-law was a German POW in WWII. Last summer he was invited to go on the “honor flight” of groups of WWII vets to see the memorials in Washington DC. His biggest thrill was meeting face to face with the real Kilroy. He said the GIs in Europe loved plastering “Kilroy was here” anywhere they could. It was their collective spoof on who ever was seeing the inscription and was amazed at how that Kilroy guy was able to travel all over the continent. Kilroy had no idea of how the joke got started.

  5. My first semester of college, fall 1973, I was forced to take a slide rule class as part of my pre-Electrical Engineering curriculum at SEMO. I took into that class a brand-new $120 Hewlett Packard HP21 calculator that blew the doors off of any other calculator available at the time and it was truly a replacement for the slide rule. Art Soellner was the prof for the class and required that we learn to use the slide rule regardless because; “What if your batteries are dead and you have no access electricity to charge them?”
    We did have some fun toward the end of the semester with some calculating contests; slide rule vs calculator. It was no contest…

    Alas, by Fall Semester 1974, Slide Rule class was no longer offered.

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