Edith Shain, left, and Carl Muscarello pose with Alfred Eisenstaedt’s Life Magazine V-J Day photo of a sailor kissing a nurse. For 30 years, both have claimed to be the people in the famous photo. Larry Verria, the co-author of a new book about the photo, tells CBS that new evidence rules out everyone except George Mendonsa and Greta Friedman as the kissing couple. (Read the Original Dallas News Post Here)
Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photo of a sailor and nurse kissing on V-J Day has been the subject of intrigue over the past 67 years, with numerous people claiming to be the subjects of the photo. This has to be one of the most famous photos ever published in LIFE magazine.
A book was recently published that claims to unravel the mystery once and for all, The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo That Ended World War II, written by Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi.
Here’s some background on the book on amazon.com:
On August 14, 1945, Alfred Eisenstaedt took a picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, minutes after they heard of Japan’s surrender to the United States. Two weeks later LIFE magazine published that image. It became one of the most famous WWII photographs in history (and the most celebrated photograph ever published in the world’s dominant photo-journal), a cherished reminder of what it felt like for the war to finally be over. Everyone who saw the picture wanted to know more about the nurse and sailor, but Eisenstaedt had no information and a search for the mysterious couple’s identity took on a dimension of its own. In 1979 Eisenstaedt thought he had found the long lost nurse. And as far as almost everyone could determine, he had. For the next thirty years Edith Shain was known as the woman in the photo of V-J DAY, 1945, TIMES SQUARE. In 1980 LIFE attempted to determine the sailor’s identity. Many aging warriors stepped forward with claims, and experts weighed in to support one candidate over another. Chaos ensued.
For almost two decades Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi were intrigued by the controversy surrounding the identity of the two principals in Eisenstaedt’s most famous photograph and collected evidence that began to shed light on this mystery. Unraveling years of misinformation and controversy, their findings propelled one claimant’s case far ahead of the others and, at the same time, dethroned the supposed kissed nurse when another candidate’s claim proved more credible. With this book, the authors solve the 67-year-old mystery by providing irrefutable proof to identify the couple in Eisenstaedt’s photo. It is the first time the whole truth behind the celebrated picture has been revealed.
On Saturday morning, CBS will be airing a reunion between George Mendonsa and Greta Friedman, named as the couple in the book on CBS This Morning.
To mark the 67th anniversary of V-J Day, the sailor and the woman seen kissing in the iconic Times Square photograph are reunited on August 11 on CBS THIS MORNING: SATURDAY (check local listings) on the CBS Television Network.
CBS News Correspondent Michelle Miller speaks with George Mendonsa and Greta Friedman, who were photographed kissing in Times Square on August 14, 1945, the day the Japanese surrendered, thus ending World War II. In Saturday’s report, Mendonsa, 89, and Friedman, 88, meet in Times Square for just the second time since 1945 to reminisce about their photo published in Life magazine, which came to symbolize the war’s end.
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