Lad frozen in time as witness to iconic kiss
CHILLICOTHE, OHIO — For most travelers, layovers hold little excitement beyond a good cup of coffee or a comfortable seat to pass the time in.
On Aug. 14, 1945, however, a 17-year-old boy from Ross County, Ohio, stumbled upon something much more exciting, not to mention historic.
Robert Smalley was traveling by train to Boston to be seen by his cousin — a physician — for a nagging back injury he’d suffered while playing football.
After arriving at Grand Central Terminal in New York City for a two-hour layover, he walked several blocks west to Times Square, where a celebration had just broken out after President Truman announced the Japanese surrender and the end of the war.
It was there that Smalley witnessed a sailor grab a woman he didn’t know and kiss her right on the lips. Two photojournalists, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Navy Lt. Victor Jorgenson, were there, too, and they captured the moment on film from different angles.
Eisenstaedt’s photo was later published in Life magazine and became one of the most famous images from the World War II era, if not the entire 20th century. (It appears on the cover of this special edition.) Jorgenson’s photo, published the next day in The New York Times, is less iconic. But it means more to Smalley.
The guy in the background of that photo, with the white shirt and the befuddled look on his face? Smalley says it’s him.
“I was in Times Square and realized what was going on,” Smalley says of the celebration. “I was amazed when the sailor kissed the nurse. I didn’t think they knew each other.”
Now 86, Smalley lives in an assisted-living facility where Jorgenson’s photo hangs in his bedroom. His speaking ability has been hampered by aphasia, but in an interview, he recalled being “ankle-deep in confetti” that day.
“He didn’t even talk to us about it,” says Smalley’s daughter, Marsha Beery. “I don’t think he knew the picture was so well-known until recently.”
Smalley never served in the military, but he knew as well as anybody the toll of World War II. Several months before happening upon that Times Square celebration marking the end of the Pacific war, his brother David was killed in action in the Philippines.
Family legend has it that when Smalley’s mother found out her son had been killed, she mowed the yard before telling the rest of the family. “That was her way of grieving, I guess,” Beery says.
Smalley, who was closer to David than to any other sibling, “was just devastated,” she says.
Smalley worked the land most of his life, looking after his family’s 200-acre dairy farm near South Salem, Ohio. In 1968, he sold the cows and embarked on a new career with the Ross County Health District as the director of environmental health.
That 17-year-old farm boy from Ross County would probably get a kick out of knowing his picture would some day end up in the National Archives.
“I think, when you’re living history, you don’t realize it at the time,” Beery says.