Kissing Sailor Turns Hero

MiamiHerald.com | 09/17/2006 | 'Kissing sailor' sinks home invader

Everyone knows this famous Life magazine photo. It's probably one of the most loved and reproduced images of American history.

The sailor is Carl Muscarello (known to friends as Moose), now an 80 year old man living in Plantation, FL, just a few miles from me. He is also a badass. You go, Carl!

Here is the story reproduced from the Miami Herald today below, along with a photo of Carl and nurse Edith Shain reenacting their famous kiss in front of their statue:

Burglars were thwarted by Carl Muscarello, better known as the sailor who kissed a uniformed nurse in Times Square in a famous Life magazine photograph.

BY TRENTON DANIEL AND JENNIFER LEBOVICH

tdaniel@MiamiHerald.com

Two would-be burglars proved no match for 80-year-old Carl Muscarello when they calmly walked into his Plantation home.

Muscarello said he and his wife had just returned from a memorial service Tuesday morning and left his garage door open, planning to change and quickly go out again for a game of golf.

Minutes later, one of the burglars turned Muscarello's own golf club on his family.

These guys picked on the wrong family.

Muscarello, a retired New York City police detective, is perhaps best known as the tall, dark-haired sailor who's credited with kissing a white-uniformed nurse in New York's Times Square in an August 1945 photograph. The kiss, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life magazine, was Muscarello's way of celebrating Japan's World War II surrender.

Sixty-one years later, Muscarello's adrenaline was again racing -- this time because his family was in danger.

''My wife was in the kitchen,'' said Muscarello, 80. ``I heard a scream. She came running to the bedroom. Shelly said someone was in the house.''

Muscarello saw a stranger swinging a golf club at his 36-year-old stepson Rob, a member of the Indiana Army National Guard, who was home visiting. Shelly Muscarello ran to a neighbor's house to dial 911.

One of the intruders took off through the front door. Muscarello went after the other one.

A CHOKEHOLD

''I jumped on this man's back and put a chokehold on him. I was surprised I could do it,'' said Muscarello, who wrestled with the man.

They crashed through a kitchen window in the home. The burglar tried to pick up a piece of broken glass to slice Muscarello with it, he said.

''I had him pinned down to the concrete by the pool floor when the police got here,'' Muscarello said. 'He said, `Let me go -- I'll give you plenty of money.' ''

Muscarello didn't.

Officers came and arrested the intruder. Police couldn't be reached late Saturday for details on the case.

Days later, the Muscarellos were still rattled.

''I'm probably never going to get past this,'' Shelly Muscarello, 67, said Saturday.

Of course, Carl Muscarello -- known as ''Moose'' to his friends -- seems to have lived a life of fortuitous circumstances.

In his den filled with keepsakes, he has a clipped newspaper photograph of himself providing security to John F. Kennedy in New York -- days before, he said, the president was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.

`A STRANGE PLACE'

Also on the wall, Muscarello has several photographs of the famous Times Square kiss -- of which he's done many reenactments, including one a year ago for the 60th anniversary of V-J Day.

He and Edith Shain, believed to be the smooched nurse, reunited in Times Square for a mock kiss.

''I often happen to be at a strange place at a strange time,'' Muscarello said.