Kiss and Tell

Have you ever followed the trail to one of your thought destinations? This morning, I was thinking about the 4th of July,

which led me to thinking about Uncle Sam,

which led me to the slogan of "I WANT YOU,"

which led me to serving our country,

which led me to WW2,

which reminded me of my favorite picture capturing a glorious moment in our history, V-J Day.

I have always liked this picture. Being a former "Navy Wife," it tugged at my romantic heart strings.

Strange how the mind works, isn't it? Or maybe it is just how my mind works.

Surely you are familiar with this picture:




But what you may not know is the story behind it:

In the crowd that day, Aug. 15, 1945, was a photographer for Life magazine. Alfred Eisenstaedt, one of the pioneers of the candid photo, was looking for the perfect shot to reflect the euphoria of the moment.

“I saw a sailor grabbing every woman in sight,” he recalled. “So I ran ahead of him. He was in dark blue, so I waited until he grabbed someone in white.”

The photo that appeared in Life – the nurse in a white uniform being dipped and kissed by the sailor – is the most reproduced picture in the history of the magazine. Only decades later did Shain write to Life and say she believed she was the nurse in the photo.

Shain, 87, a retired Los Angeles school district teacher, is certain she’s the nurse in the photo, and she wrote to the magazine in 1980 to stake her claim. And at least in the mind of the photographer, Shain was the one, and he said so when they met years later.

“I wouldn’t say it’s changed my life so much as enriched it,” she said while sitting in the living room of her small but comfortable home off Olympic Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

She has three children and has gone through three marriages during her lifetime, most of which was spent teaching in Los Angeles public schools.


There have been charges that the photo was posed and that it didn’t happen on V-J Day, but few dispute that this was one of those great moments in the history of photography.

Shain was a 27-year-old native New Yorker, still married to her first husband but separated and working as a nurse at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan.


“You can imagine how people felt. They were just elated,” she said. “Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country. I closed my eyes when I kissed him. I never saw him.”


After she kissed the sailor, Shain turned away, only to be met by an Army man who wanted a smooch as well. She and the friend who’d gone with her decided to leave Times Square before things got out of hand. She never even mentioned the picture to her parents.

A few years later, Shain moved to Los Angeles, intent on continuing her nursing career. But she switched to teaching, the profession she followed until her retirement in 1985.

As the years went on, she kept seeing pictures of The Kiss and finally decided that she wanted a copy. She wrote to Life and said she was the nurse in the picture. Eisenstaedt, then in his 80s but still a working photographer, flew to Los Angeles to see if she was the real person.

“Now that I was of a certain age, I wasn’t embarrassed about it any more,” she said. “He looked at my legs and said I was the one.”


The identity of the sailor has never been positively established, though not for lack of trying. In 1980, Life ran an article in which it listed 10 men who claimed to be the sailor.

They included a refrigeration mechanic at Harvard University and a New Jersey history teacher.

And there is one other tidbit to the story you might not be aware of. One massive tidbit.



This statue, named “Unconditional Surrender,” is a 25-foot, 6,000 pound structure by world-renowned artist J. Seward Johnson commemorating the famous World War II photo. It is currently located in San Diego, but has also been on display in NYC, and Sarasota, Florida. Gives me the creeps a little. Not sure why. But I think I would rather look at the picture.


Happy 4th of July!!!!

**Information above taken from an LA Times Article and an article at navy.mil.