Houston – Glenn McDuffie has claimed for years that he was the sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in Life magazine’s iconic photograph of the day World War II ended. If anyone just looked hard enough, he said, they would see it was him in the shot.
Houston Police Department forensic artist Lois Gibson took up the challenge.
And after what she called a detailed investigation, Gibson said she has concluded that McDuffie, 80, is the man in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s Aug. 14, 1945, image.
For this investigation, she had McDuf fie pose for new photos in his sailor uniform, recreating the famous pose with a pillow instead of a nurse. She measured his ears, facial bones, hairline, wrist, knuckles and hand and compared those to enlargements of Eisenstaedt’s picture.
“I could tell just in general that yes, it’s him,” said Gibson, a 25-year department veteran. “But I wanted to be able to tell other people, so I replicated the pose.”
Life magazine, however, isn’t convinced the Houston man is the sailor in the photograph, which is the magazine’s most reproduced image.
Because Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995, didn’t identify the subjects of the photo, Life Books editorial director Robert Sullivan said the identities will officially remain a mystery. Other men have purported to be the sailor. Several women have claimed to be the nurse.
Gibson compared some of the other men to Eisenstaedt’s photo.
“All other people who have come forward I have eliminated based on their facial bones,” she said. “To me, that’s definitive. Everything is consistent. I’m as positive as you can be.”
Before McDuffie, now battling lung cancer, dies, the North Carolina native wants the world to know he was the sailor in the famous photograph.
He said he was changing trains in New York when he was told that Japan had surrendered and World War II was over.
“I was so happy. I ran out in the street,” said McDuffie, then 18 and on his way to visit his girlfriend. “And then I saw that nurse. She saw me hollering and with a big smile on my face. … I just went right to her and kissed her.”
