On Aug. 14, 1945, Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured one of the most iconic images of World War II, when he trained his camera on a sailor stealing a kiss from a woman in a nurse’s uniform during a spontaneous victory celebration in Times Square.
This is a story about a different photograph from V-J Day — one showing a subtler scene on the other side of the country, with an eventual Tucson connection.
On the day President Harry Truman announced the Japanese surrender, 80 years ago Thursday, a sailor named George “Buck” Barger took to the streets of San Francisco with a buddy to celebrate the end of the war.
A street photographer snapped a candid photo of the grinning men in uniform as they walked through the bustling city. Barger is the tall, slender sailor on the right, with his white dixie cup hat pitched down across his forehead.
On V-J Day, 80 years ago this Aug. 14, a sailor named George "Buck" Barger, right, took to the streets of San Francisco with a buddy to celebrate the end of World War II. A candid photo of the grinning young men in uniform is now on display at the Tucson home of Barger's grandson, Robert.
The photograph is now on display at the Tucson home of Barger’s grandson, Robert, who sees genuine joy, a hint of salvation and the promise of an important future in the face of the man who would eventually become his beloved “Pawpaw.”
“They look happy to me,” Robert Barger said, looking at the young sailors in the photo. “It’s just a tiny sliver of time, but I would think it was really cool even if one of them wasn’t my grandfather.”
George Barger was born in 1924 and grew up in a fading coal mining town in Southern Illinois, about 40 miles north of the Kentucky border. He wanted to join the military after Pearl Harbor, but he was only 17 at the time, Robert said. “He thought he’d make a good tailgunner.”
Instead, he spent the early part of the war working with a cousin on a farm in Indiana. Back then, such agricultural labor could keep a young man from being drafted, but Barger couldn’t resist the call to serve.
Though he didn’t know how to swim, he ended up joining the Navy in early 1944 “because he heard they had better food,” his grandson said with a laugh.
After basic training in Idaho and engineering school in Mississippi, he was sent to the naval base on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.
“He was expecting to be shipped out at any time,” Robert said. “I’ve got to think that’s why he looks so relieved in the photo.”
The identity of the street photographer has been lost to history, but it could be a man named Joseph Selle, who ran a business called Fox Movie Flash that documented life in busy shopping areas of San Francisco for 40 years.
Selle’s records are now part of the collection at the National Museum of American History.
George “Buck” Barger in his sailor uniform.
According to the Smithsonian Institution, Selle began working as a street photographer in San Francisco in the early 1940s, and one of his favorite spots to snap pictures of passing pedestrians was at Market and Mason Streets, near the Fox Movie Flash office.
There’s a sign for Mason Street in the background of Barger’s V-J Day photo.
Robert said his grandfather recalled a photographer coming up to him on the street that day and handing him a card. Barger gave the guy some money and his parents’ address back in Illinois and kept on walking.
“He forgot all about it until it showed up in the mail,” Robert said.
Decades later, after his grandparents retired to Tucson, the picture wound up on a wall of old photos at their house off Starr Pass Boulevard, west of Tumamoc Hill. Robert remembers looking up at the wall and studying the images there, especially the ones featuring his young, Gable-esque grandfather with a pencil mustache and a Navy uniform.
“I was always just enthralled with those pictures,” he said.
And even then, the candid shot from V-J Day stood out from the rest. “As a little kid, it always confused me. I wondered, ‘Who took this picture?’” Robert said.
Barger eventually did ship out from San Francisco, serving onboard a pair of hastily built transport vessels that were launched late in the war but were mostly used to deliver occupation forces to Japan and ferry troops home after the fighting was over.
He was honorably discharged from the Navy in 1946 and returned home to Illinois after his two years of service to marry the love of his life, Betty Kirk, and start a family. They raised three boys while she worked as a school teacher and he worked as a contractor, building houses across Southern Illinois.
They retired to the Old Pueblo in 1982 to escape the Midwest winters and be closer to family, after Robert’s older brother, Beau, was born.
Robert said Barger kept himself busy working as handyman at the Church of the Painted Hills and as a volunteer at St. Mary’s Hospital and at spring training games in Tucson, but one of his favorite pastimes was being a grandfather.
On V-J Day, 80 years ago this Aug. 14, a sailor named George "Buck" Barger, right, took to the streets of San Francisco with a buddy to celebrate the end of World War II. A candid photo of the grinning young men in uniform is now on display at the Tucson home of Barger's grandson, Robert.
“He couldn’t get enough of it,” Robert said. “He certainly made a big impression on me.”
Some of Robert’s earliest memories are of Pawpaw pushing him around in a stroller.
Barger would frequently drop by the house unannounced so he could take his grandsons with him to run errands or help out with home improvement projects, Robert said. “He had this whole garage full of tools. He could build anything.”
Robert said his grandfather was like a best friend growing up. He came to all of his grandson’s youth sporting events and would pick him up after school to take him to the batting cages or to a local park to play catch or shoot hoops, even well into his 70s.
Occasionally, when Robert was older, they would skip the park and head for the casino instead.
George “Buck” Barger with his grandson, Robert Barger, in 2007.
Barger died in 2016 at the age of 91, after spending the last 34 years of his life in Tucson.
Robert tried to pay special tribute to his grandfather a few years later by petitioning to have a hill near Starr Pass named after him, but the state and federal boards on geographic names ultimately rejected the request.
Now Robert is the proud owner of many of Barger’s old pictures, documents and keepsakes, particularly from his Navy days.
The original V-J Day photograph is tucked away somewhere safe, but he keeps an enlarged copy tacked to a wall at home where he can see it everyday. It’s a reminder of his grandfather’s wartime service and what came after it.
“He wasn’t on the front lines. He didn’t come home with a Purple Heart. He was just a farm kid from Illinois, and all of a sudden there he was in San Francisco,” Robert said. “He never thought he’d make it back from the war, but I’m glad he did.”
George "Buck" Barger with his grandson, Robert Barger, in Tucson, circa 1986.
