Nurse Made Immortal With a Sailor’s Kiss

V-J Day, Aug. 15, 1945. World War II is over. Released into an exuberant, celebratory New York, a sailor rushes into Times Square, grabs a tiny nurse he’d never seen before and kisses her, bending her backwards.

The image--captured on film for Life magazine by famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt--would come to symbolize the jubilant end to a bloody chapter in American history and the return of fighting men to the women they left behind. It is one of the more famous photos to appear in Life, now celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Today, the nurse in the photo smiles shyly and wrinkles her nose daintily when asked about the chance encounter in Times Square that wedged her into history.

“Life is 99% luck and that was just an incident,” said Edith Shain, 68, now a retired Los Angeles teacher. “It didn’t change my life any. It was a freaky thing to have happened.

“It’s lovely that it commemorates what it does, the end of that terrible war.”

Shain was just finishing up her nursing shift at Doctor’s Hospital when the radios blared the news--the war was over. Grabbing a friend, Shain dashed out of the hospital and onto the subway.

“I just love festivities,” Shain said. “I had to be in the middle of it all.”

Times Square was a huge block party. Shain’s feet had hardly hit the pavement when a blue-clad sailor wordlessly threw his arms around her, she said.

“It was a very long kiss,” she said, grinning and chuckling. “I just waited for it to be over.”

Shain, a bouncy 4-feet-10, said she wasn’t angry about the stranger’s sudden intimacy, but she high-tailed it out of Times Square after the historic kiss because dozens of sailors were smooching any woman they could stop.

“I understood the exuberance of it,” she said. “They were back home and starved for females. I wasn’t offended, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to be kissed every couple of seconds.”

Divorced and with a son to raise, Shain left New York later that year to work in psychiatric nursing in Los Angeles, but she changed her mind and got a teaching credential instead. She taught kindergarten, first and second grades in the Los Angeles school system, married and divorced two more times and bore two more sons.

Shain retired a little over a year ago, and channels her considerable energy into walking, swimming, reading and painting. A voracious reader, she devours such diverse publications as National Geographic, Scientific American and Newsweek while riding her exercise bicycle.

She hopes to write books on children’s education and health care for senior citizens.

The identity of the sailor is still unknown. Shain said she felt shy about disclosing that she was the nurse in the picture, so for years she never told Life. But finally, about seven years ago, she wrote to the magazine because she wanted a copy of the picture.

She got it, in style.

Eisenstaedt, then 80, hopped on a jet from New York and delivered the 8-by-10-inch autographed photo to Shain himself. She said he recognized her right away when she stepped out of her car at the airport.

“He looked at my legs and said he knew I was the one,” she said, smiling.

Chauffeuring him around Malibu on a sunny day with the top down on her Cadillac, Shain took the German-born photographer out for his first McDonald’s hamburger. They shared a vanilla shake and became friends.

Now he calls her “Mouse” and she calls him Eisie. A collection of his photographs in her home bears the inscription, “To the one and only nurse photographed 8/15/45 in Times Square, New York City. Love, Eisie.”

After Life ran a story about Shain, nearly a dozen sailors called her from all over the country, each claiming he was the one who had planted the famous kiss in Times Square.

“One sailor called up and said, ‘Don’t you remember? You came up to me and grabbed me and held on. Don’t you remember?’ I didn’t argue, but it was clear he wasn’t the one,” she said.