Whipped Cream Difficulties

George Mendonsa has passed away at the age of 95.

Mr. Mendonsa was the man in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after the Japanese surrender.

At least, maybe he was. Eisenstaedt didn’t record the names of the sailor or nurse, and at least three women and 11 men have claimed they were one or the other.

But Mr. Mendonsa was adamant that he was the one. He sued Life in the 1980s when the magazine would not definitively acknowledge that he was the sailor, though nothing came of the lawsuit.

…

Mr. Mendonsa eventually received recognition from most parties after extensive testing. Among other efforts, in 2005, Richard Benson, a photographer and printmaker at Yale, scrutinized the photographs in the early 1980s and determined that Mr. Mendonsa’s specific features, like a cyst on his left arm and a dark patch on his right, matched those of the sailor in the photo.
Mr. Mendonsa’s face was painstakingly 3-D mapped, then reverse-aged, to show that it matched the sailor’s in Eisenstaedt’s picture. Four years later Norman Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, analyzed the photo and said he could not find a single inconsistency between Mr. Mendonsa’s face and the sailor’s.

Greta Friedman, who may have been the nurse, passed away in 2016.