Apr 4, 2025 3 min read "American Girl in Italy"

Old School: New Friends

"American Girl in Italy," by photographer Ruth Orkin, captures Nanalee Allen Craig navigating through a group of ogling Italian men in Firenze, Italy in 1951. Craig's Washington Post obituary in 2018 caught the author's eye.

By Carol McEwen

I love to read — everything from toothpaste tubes to museum signs. But I’m confessing a secret reading obsession, even though it sounds a teeeny bit maudlin. I like to read Obituaries, even though I’m not a fan of death. The articles tell me people’s stories and what better way to learn them, since I can’t meet them in person?

I would have loved knowing Margaret M. DeAdder, described in her obit as a “professional clipper of coupons, baker of cookies, terror behind the wheel, champion of the underdog, ruthless card player and self-described Queen Bitch.” Quite a gal!

And how could I resist the 2019 one written for George Mensonsa, 95, believed to be the sailor in the iconic kissing photo taken in Times Square on V-J Day? His kiss inspired posters and even a statue called “Unconditional Surrender.” In an interview, Mr. Mensonsa confessed a soft spot for nurses, since he had seen the wonderful care they took of wounded vets. His wife laughed and said, “In all these years, George never kissed me like that.”

But, did you see the obit for the kissing sailor? Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day.

A photo of Margo Rogers Kurtz as a young beauty caught my eye in her parting tribute. She soloed in a small, open cockpit plane and was the first woman to christen a combat airplane. It had been cobbled together from other damaged planes by her pilot husband and his crew. They called it the Swoose — part swan and part goose. Later she and her husband named their actress daughter, Swoosie, after it. Swoosie described her mother as “the perfect wartime bride of the 1940’s: beautiful, capable, the perfect combination of stiff upper lip and fire engine red lipstick.”

Obit photo for Margo Rogers Kurtz, mother of actress Swoosie Kurtz. Courtesy *LA Times.*

If you saw the movie “Argo,” you learned about the man pictured in another juicy obit. Portrayed by Ben Afleck on the big screen, Tony Mendez came up with the inventive scheme to sneak six Americans out of Iran after it fell. With a career as a spy and as the chief of disguise for the CIA, he whisked them out of the Canadian Embassy, (where they were hidden,) claiming they were Canadian film makers for the fictional movie studio, Argo.

My all-time favorite appeared in the Washington Post on May 4, 2018, and concerned Nanalee Allen Craig. Her photo illustrated “American Girl in Italy” which appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in a 1952 photo essay about young women traveling alone — uncommon at the time. It shows six-foot-tall Nanalee breezing through a crowd of ogling, catcalling Italian men and became a poster rallying cry for feminists worldwide. Eventually, she married an Italian Count, ironically the cousin of one of the pictured men. When interviewed in later life, she said she got “more free meals in Italian restaurants than you’ll ever know.”

This obsessed Old School reader was never lucky enough to know these people, so I had to settle for meeting them second-hand.

Carol McEwen is a reporter for Sandestin Living, Mirimar Beach, Florida, and wrote the weekly Old School column for the Arlington Sun Gazette/Gazette Leader.