Edith Shain, who became something of a celebrity decades after World War II, asserting that she was the nurse kissed by a sailor in Life magazine's memorable photograph of V-J Day in Times Square, died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her death was announced by her family.
On the 60th anniversary of Japan's surrender, in 2005, the Times Square Alliance welcomed Mrs. Shain to its commemoration of that frenzied August day in 1945, when strangers were hugging and kissing everywhere in the throngs that came to Times Square to celebrate the war's end.
Wearing sneakers and a nurse's uniform, Mrs. Shain re-enacted the moment captured by Life's renowned photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. Many men have claimed to be the sailor who bestowed the kiss.
"The happiness was indescribable," Mrs. Shain said of the original V-J Day celebration. "It was a very long kiss."
Mrs. Shain was back in New York in 2008, that time as grand marshal for the city's Veterans Day Parade.
When Mr. Eisenstaedt took his photograph, he did not get the names of the embracing sailor and the nurse, and their faces were largely obscured. A Navy photographer, Lt. Victor Jorgensen, also photographed the pair, but he, too, did not obtain their identities.
Thirty-five years later, Mrs. Shain, who was teaching kindergarten in Los Angeles after having been a nurse at Doctors Hospital in New York during the war, wrote to Mr. Eisenstaedt, saying "now that I'm 60 it's fun to admit that I'm the nurse in your famous shot." (She was 27 when it was taken). She asked him for a print.
Mr. Eisenstaedt visited Mrs. Shain, and Life reproduced her letter to him in its August 1980 issue, along with pictures he took of her with her family and her students. Mrs. Shain said she had recognized herself in the photo but had kept silent over all those years. "I didn't think it was dignified, but times have changed," she told Life.
Two months later, Life published photos of 10 men who had come forward to say they were the sailor in that photo, and a picture of yet another man, no longer alive, whose family had put in a claim. It also ran pictures of two other women who said they were the nurse.
"We received claims from a few nurses and dozens of sailors but we could never prove that any of them were the actual people, and Eisenstaedt himself just said he didn't know," Bobbi Baker Burrows, an editor at Life, told The Associated Press in 2008.
Edith Shain was born in Tarrytown, N.Y., on July 29, 1918. She graduated from New York University and moved to Los Angeles a few years after the war ended.
She is survived by her sons Robert and Michael Shain and Justin Decker, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
When Mrs. Shain arrived in New York in 2008 for the city's Veterans Day Parade, she spoke of what the V-J Day photo meant to her.
"It says so many things," she told The Associated Press. "Hope, love, peace and tomorrow."
