The U.S. sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in a famous World War II photo taken by a Life magazine photographer has died. Glenn McDuffie was 86.
McDuffie died March 9 in a nursing home in Dallas, his daughter, Glenda Bell, said.
A mail carrier and semiprofessional baseball player after he returned from the Second World War, McDuffie's life became more exciting about six years ago when Houston Police Department forensic artist Lois Gibson was able to identify him as the young man leaning over the woman in his arms to kiss her. By taking about 100 pictures of McDuffie using a pillow to pose as he did in the picture taken Aug. 14, 1945, by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gibson said, she was able to match the muscles, ears and other features of the then-80-year old McDuffie to the young sailor in the original image.
"I was absolutely positive,"
Gibson said of the match. "It was perfect."
The identification remained controversial, partly because other men also claimed to have been the sailor in the image, but also because Life magazine, whose photographer had died years earlier, was unable to confirm that McDuffie was in fact the sailor, noting Eisenstaedt had never got names for those in the picture.
Yet for McDuffie, Gibson's word was enough. A well-respected forensic artist who was in the 2005 Guinness Book of World Records for helping police identify more suspects than any other forensic artist, Gibson said McDuffie was ecstatic when she told him the results he had waited 62 years to hear.
McDuffie told the Chronicle in 2007 that he never spoke to the nurse before he kissed her during celebrations to mark the end of fighting with Japan in August 1945. He was 18 at the time.
“When I got off from the subway, a lady told me the war was over, and I went into the street yelling. I saw the nurse and she was smiling at me, so I just grabbed her,” he said.
He said he kept quiet about the picture for years and only came forward in 1980, when the editors of Life were seeking the two people in the photograph.--Source: StarPhoenix/WGAN
 |
| Glenn McDuffie on the iconic photo: "I saw the nurse and she was smiling at me, so I just grabbed her.” |