The man behind the kiss?

Chances are that we all know Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic Life magazine photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day — easily one of the most-recognized photographs in American history. In the half-century since that photo was taken, there's been a lot of speculation over who, exactly, the sailor and nurse were: In the midst of the celebration, Eisenstaedt didn't stop to ask names, and there were apparently a lot of sailors kissing anything in a skirt in Times Square that day. But now there may be conclusive evidence as to the identity of the sailor: It looks like he was Glenn McDuffie, now 80 years old and a resident of Houston.

McDuffie has long claimed he was the sailor in the photo, but so have several other men: In 1980, Life tried to find the sailor, and 11 guys claimed the distinction (McDuffie wasn't one of them). General consensus seems to be that the nurse in the photo was Edith Shain, who wrote Eisenstaedt a letter years ago identifying herself after she saw a story about the photographer in the Los Angeles Times: "I had left Doctors' Hospital and wanted to be part of the celebration, but this amorous sailor and a subsequent soldier motivated a retreat into the next opening of the subway," Shain wrote of the events of Aug. 15, 1945. "I wish I had stored that jubilation and amour for use P.R.N." In the mid-1990s, Shain decided that it was former New York City cop Carl Muscarello who had kissed her — though 10 years later, she said she wasn't so sure. (A print of the photo signed by Muscarello and Shain, by the way, is being offered for $2,799 on eBay.)

Back to McDuffie: He's now fighting lung cancer and said he wanted to prove he was the man in the photo before he dies. So he enlisted the help of renowned Houston forensic artist Lois Gibson, who took measurements of McDuffie's wrists, knuckles, forehead, arms and ears and compared them with the features of the man in the photo and with those of the 11 men who claimed to be the sailor. "I was able to eliminate all the others based on their foreheads, or the superciliary arch — where the eyebrows are," Gibson told the Chronicle. Unfortunately, your nose grows all your life. I have a picture of Glenn showing that his nose is different. But that growth is normal and was to be expected." McDuffie has taken lie detector tests and is the only person who was able to identify the other two sailors in the photo, and he was able to answer Gibson's question about why the sailor's arm was shown at an odd angle in the photo: McDuffie said it was because he realized someone was taking the picture, so he moved his hand so the nurse's face would show. Based on the evidence, Gibson said she's willing to stake her reputation on the fact that McDuffie is the man in the photo. "I don't say this lightly. What I do is usually a matter of life or death, so I don't mess around when I identify someone," she said.

McDuffie served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946; he said he happened to be in Times Square when word of the Japanese surrender came. "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 told the Chronicle. "But we never spoke." After the war, McDuffie worked for the post office, played semipro baseball and worked for a florist in southwest Houston. He said he's never wanted publicity for being in the photo, but was upset that people didn't recognize that he was — and we guess there's not a whole lot of publicity to be had, but if it makes any difference, Shain seemed to think the kiss wasn't an altogether bad experience. "It was a good kiss, it went on for a long time," she told Life in 1980. "I closed my eyes, I didn't resist. I think, sometimes, if I hadn't been with my girlfriend, I might have stayed."