He made ‘kiss’tory
Times Sq. V-Day icon dies at 95
The sailor who joined with a woman in a nurse’s uniform in Times Square for a dramatic V-J Day kiss that became the most indelible image of America’s jubilation at the end of World War II has died at age 95, it was announced Monday.
George Mendonsa fell and suffered a seizure Sunday at a Middletown, RI, assisted-living facility, his daughter Sharon Molleur told The Providence Journal.
The Navy veteran lived at the facility with his wife of 70 years — although she was not the woman he was photographed smooching when Japan surrendered to the United States on Aug. 14, 1945, known as V-J Day.
That was Greta Zimmer Friedman, a dental assistant in a nurse’s uniform who had never met Mendonsa when he locked lips with her at the Crossroads of the World.
Mendonsa, who was on leave from a destroyer at the time, said Friedman reminded him of military nurses who cared for injured sailors.
“I saw what those nurses did that day, and now back in Times Square the war ends, a few drinks, so I grabbed the nurse,” Mendonsa said, according to WPRI-TV.
“I had a few drinks, and it was just plain instinct, I guess. I just grabbed her,” he told CNN.
He also happened to be on a first date with another woman, Rita Petry, at the time.
“I was in the background, grinning like a mutt,” Petry told CNN in 2005. “It didn’t matter to me.”
Friedman, who fled her homeland of Austria at 15 during the war, said the canoodle came out of nowhere.
“The guy just came over and kissed or grabbed,” she told the Library of Congress in 2005.
“It was just somebody really celebrating. But it wasn’t a romantic event.”
Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt caught the impromptu peck as New Yorkers flooded the streets to celebrate the end of the war. The snap, first published in Life magazine, became one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.
“When I look at that photograph, I just think of my dad’s service, and how happy he was that it was all over,” Sharon Molleur told CNN.
Friedman died of natural causes in 2016 at age 92.