Camp Kilmer, New Jersey is a former United States Army camp that was activated in June 1942 as a staging area and part of an installation of the New York Port of Embarkation. The camp was organized as part of the Army Service Forces Transportation Corps. Troops were quartered at Camp Kilmer in preparation for transport to the European Theater of Operations in World War II. Eventually, it became the largest processing center for troops heading overseas and returning from World War II, processing over 2.5 million soldiers. It officially closed in 2009.

The camp was named for Joyce Kilmer, the soldier-poet killed in World War I while serving with The Fighting 69th, most famous for writing the poem, Trees. His home was in nearby New Brunswick, New Jersey.

The site was selected in 1941 by the War Department as the best site to serve the New York Port Of Embarkation. Construction began in early 1942. Located in Piscataway Township, New Jersey and Edison Township, New Jersey at 40°31′00″N 74°26′45″W / 40.5166667°N 74.44583°W / 40.5166667; -74.44583, the closest city was New Brunswick located two miles to the south. Plainfield was located four miles north of the camp. New York City could be reached by the mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad, it was about 22 miles to the northeast, although many troop embarkations would be at the New Jersey locations of Bayonne and Hoboken; a flyover loop crossing the four-track mainline (now the Amtrak NEC) allowed movements into the large train loading yards without interference with mainline traffic. The camp was also served by the Port Reading branch of the Reading Railroad and the Amboy branch of the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

Alfred Joyce Kilmer (December 6, 1886 – July 30, 1918) was an American journalist, poet, literary critic, lecturer, and editor. Though a prolific poet whose works celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his religious faith, Kilmer is remembered most for a short poem titled "Trees" (1913), which was published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914. While most of his works are unknown, a select few of his poems remain popular and are published frequently in anthologies. Several critics, both Kilmer's contemporaries and modern scholars, disparaged Kilmer's work as being too simple, overly sentimental, and suggested that his style was far too traditional, even archaic.

At the time of his deployment to Europe during World War I (1914–1918), Kilmer was considered the leading American Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, whom critics often compared to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). A sergeant in the 165th U.S. Infantry Regiment (better known as 'The Fighting 69th), Kilmer was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 at the age of 31.

James Edward Franco (born April 19, 1978) is an American actor. His first prominent role was a lead part on the short-lived cult hit television program Freaks and Geeks; he later achieved recognition for playing the titular character in the TV biographical film James Dean (2001), for which he was awarded a Golden Globe Award. He achieved international fame with his portrayals of Harry Osborn in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy.

Franco has won or been nominated for a number of awards. He has done both dramatic and comedic work in projects and has appeared in an eclectic range of films since the 2000s, ranging from period to contemporary pieces, and from major Hollywood productions to less publicized indie films, as well as fantasy films to biopics and soap operas. Other notable films include Pineapple Express, a 2008 stoner comedy that earned him his second Golden Globes nomination; the 2008 Harvey Milk-biopic Milk; and Danny Boyle's 2010 drama film 127 Hours, about real-life mountain climber Aron Ralston's struggle to free his hand from a boulder. His performance in 127 Hours earned him nominations for many high-profile awards, including the Academy Awards, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2011, he starred opposite Andy Serkis in Rupert Wyatt's successful science fiction film Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise. Since 2009, he has played a recurring role in the ABC daytime soap opera General Hospital.

Val Edward Kilmer (born December 31, 1959) is an American actor. Originally a stage actor, Kilmer is best known for his role as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors, as Bruce Wayne/Batman in Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever. He became popular in the mid-1980s after a string of appearances in comedy films, starting with Top Secret! (1984), then the cult classic Real Genius (1985), as well as blockbuster action films, including a supporting role in Top Gun and a lead role in Willow.

Kilmer was born in in Los Angeles, California, the son of Gladys (née Ekstadt) and Eugene Kilmer, an aerospace equipment distributor and real estate developer. Kilmer's grandfather was a gold miner in New Mexico; the poet Joyce Kilmer is a distant cousin of Kilmer's. Kilmer is of German, Swedish, Irish, and Cherokee descent. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley with his two siblings, older brother Mark and younger brother Wesley (who died at 15 due to an epileptic seizure in a swimming pool). His parents divorced when he was nine years old.

Ray Cummings (byname of Raymond King Cummings; August 30, 1887 – January 23, 1957) was an American author of science fiction, rated one of the "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre".[1] He was born in New York and died in Mount Vernon, New York.

Cummings worked with Thomas Edison as a personal assistant and technical writer from 1914 to 1919. His most highly regarded work was the novel The Girl in the Golden Atom published in 1922, which was a consolidation of a short story by the same name published in 1919 and a sequel, The People of the Golden Atom, published in 1920. His career resulted in some 750 novels and short stories, using also the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings, and Gabriel Wilson.^{[citation needed]}

During the 1940s, with his fiction career in eclipse, Cummings anonymously scripted comic book stories for Timely Comics, the predecessor to Marvel Comics. He recycled the plot of "The Girl in the Golden Atom," for a two-part Captain America tale, "Princess of the Atom." (Captain America #25 & 26) He also contributed to the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner, which his daughter Betty Cummings also wrote.