George Mendonsa: News Report of His Death - February 17, 2019

Iconic sailor, George Mendosa, has died. He was 95 years old.
World War II Folk Figure. George Mendonsa (or alternatively Mendonça, according to certain sources) of Newport, Rhode Island, on leave from the USS The Sullivans (DD-537), was watching a movie with his future wife, Rita Petry, at Radio City Music Hall when the doors opened and people started screaming the war was over. George and Rita joined the celebration in the street, but when they could not get into the packed bars decided to walk down the street. It was then that George saw a woman in a white dress walk by and took her into his arms and kissed her, "I had quite a few drinks that day and I considered her one of the troops-she was a nurse." In one of the four photographs that Eisenstaedt took, Mendonsa claims that Rita is visible in the background behind the kissing couple. In 1987, George Mendonsa filed a lawsuit against Time Inc. in Rhode Island state court, alleging that he was the sailor in the photograph and that both Time and Life had violated his right of publicity by using the photograph without his permission. Citing legal costs, Mendonsa dropped his lawsuit in 1988. Mendonsa was identified by a team of volunteers from the Naval War College in August 2005 as "the kisser". His claim was based on matching his scars and tattoos to scars and tattoos in the photograph. They made their determination after much study including photographic analysis by the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who were able to match scars and tattoo spotted by photograph experts, and the testimony of Richard M. Benson, a photograph analysis expert, professor of photographic studies, plus the former dean of the School of Arts at Yale University. Benson stated that "it is therefore my opinion, based upon a reasonable degree of certainty, that George Mendonsa is the sailor in Mr. Eisenstaedt's famous photograph." The identity of the sailor as George Mendonsa has been challenged by physicists Donald W. Olson and Russell Doescher of Texas State University and Steve Kawaler of Iowa State University based on astronomical conditions recorded by the photographs of the incident. According to Mendonsa's account of the events of the day, the kiss would have occurred at approximately 2 p.m. However, Olson and Doescher argue that the positions of shadows in the photographs suggest that it was taken after 5 p.m. They further point to a clock seen in the photograph, its minute hand near the 10 and its hour hand pointing virtually vertically downward, indicating a time of approximately 5:50, and to Victor Jorgensen's account of the circumstances of his own photograph. They concluded that Mendonsa's version of events is untenable.

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Snapshot of history. Kind of the photo that defines the end of the war and the relief of it being over, if you think about it.