I've always been curious to know who authors get star struck over, and whether they've brushed shoulders with the people they most admire. So...we're starting a cool new author series in which they get to share their six degrees of separation or close calls with celebrities/authors/musicians....
This story comes from author Brian Fitzgerald, who has a very unique and interesting family history:
During World War Two a mysterious phenomenon developed. The phrase ‘Kilroy Was Here’ started appearing wherever American soldiers and sailors went. It was scrawled on walls and ammunition boxes. Painted on airplanes. Scratched into bricks. It became so commonplace that Adolph Hitler was said to inquire to his staff about ‘who is this Kilroy man who seems to be everywhere?”
After the war a search was conducted by Yankee
Magazine to get to the root of the mystery. The originator, it turns out, was
my grandfather on my mother’s side, James Kilroy. He was an inspector at the
Fore River shipyard in Quincy Massachusetts, where the ‘Liberty Ships’ were
being built that ferried soldiers and supplied across the oceans to the front
lines. His boss, the story goes, had criticized him for not inspecting all the
areas of the ship during construction. So he began scrawling ‘Kilroy Was Here’
on the panels of the ship as he inspected them, to prove he was doing his job.
Soldiers spent weeks on these vessels and saw the saying in air ducts, on deck
plates and in places no human could reach. As mystified as anyone as to the
origin of these writings, they took the saying with them across Europe and the
Pacific.
Today the saying appears on T-shirts, the Duck
Boats in Boston, and still exists in thousands of places across Europe and the
Pacific.
Even more strangely, after the contest had
been solved by Yankee Magazine, the Boston Transit company gifted my
grandparents a trolley car as a recognition of his role in the story. The car
was converted to sleeping quarters for my uncles at their small house in
Halifax Massachusetts, as the family had fallen on hard times during the war.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ten years of frustration and heartbreak caring for his son John,
born with a catastrophic heart defect, have convinced Rick Morrow that the
world is stacked against his family. And on what should be the best day of
their life -- the day when John will finally get a new heart - an even worse
nightmare begins, when the helicopter carrying the heart crashes, destroying
the heart and the hopes of the Morrow family.
Rick's heartbreak turns to rage as he begins to suspect that the
accident was no accident at all. His pursuit of the truth puts him on a
collision course with the giant Cera Corporation and the powerful family that
runs it, who have an agenda of their own and will stop at nothing to make it
come true. The escalating conflict threatens Rick's reputation, his safety and
even his marriage. It reaches its gut-wrenching climax with Rick and his wife
Mary facing and even more terrible question; will they sacrifice all they
believe in to save their own son, at a cost almost too high to imagine?
Over the course of career in marketing and technology Brian made his living through storytelling, communicating in print, online and national broadcast TV. During that time, as head of communications for a billion-dollar information security firm, he had a role in some of the most tumultuous events in cybersecurity including major breaches and global privacy issues. Brian has worked with (and at times been at odds with) the media, academia and even America’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. These experiences have informed his fiction writing, as he strives to bring to life the human consequences of advances in technology, medicine and social media.
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