Seven decades ago, Petty Officer 1st Class George Mendonsa and his date were among the hordes in Times Square celebrating Japan's surrender and the end of World War II when Mendonsa grabbed what he thought was a nurse (she was a dental assistant), leaned her back and kissed her in a fit of emotion.
Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured the moment, and as they say, the rest is history. The iconic photo came to represent the relief and excitement over the war's end, but Eisenstaedt never got his subjects' names.
On the photo's 40th anniversary, Life asked the nurse and the sailor to come forward, fielding hundreds of submissions. But it wasn't until 2005 - 60 years after the fact - that a Yale photography expert was able to analyze the photos and identify the two as now 92-year-old Mendonsa, of Rhode Island, and Greta Zimmer Friedman, a 91-year-old Maryland native.
The key was a woman looking on in the background, the only notable person whose faced wasn't obscured: Mendonsa's future wife, Rita (not shown in this cropped image).
"Everyone was celebrating and I'd had a few drinks in me," Mendonsa told Navy Times in 2005. "It was a real brief moment, honestly, and all my memories of the wounded being cared for by those nurses came back."
