Glenn McDuffie may have spent the past 25 or 30 years in Houston, but he's still a Carolina boy — born in a mill house at Cannon Mills and raised on Packard Avenue in Kannapolis, just up the street from some of the world's greatest race car drivers.

Yep, McDuffie will tell anyone who asks that he's a Tar Heel through and through.

He also says he appears in the second-most-reproduced photograph in the world: the image of the slim young sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square to celebrate the end of World War II.

Fact is, when the photo was taken, he'd just finished several weeks' leave back in Kannapolis.

He'd returned to New York a few days early, hoping to talk his way onto a ship headed to the Far East, where his older brother had survived the infamous Bataan Death March and was a POW.

On Aug. 14, 1945, the day Japan surrendered, McDuffie and his buddies were changing subway trains in Times Square when a woman touched his arm and said, "Sailor, I'm so happy for you."

"Why?" McDuffie said.

"The war is over, for good," she said.

"Are you sure?" McDuffie responded, incredulous.

"Why yes," she replied. "They just flashed it in Times Square."

McDuffie said he immediately thought of his older brother, who'd finally be coming home.

"I ran out into the street a jumpin' and a hollerin'," he said.

Then he saw a nurse holding out her arms. Beckoning to him.

What was a red-blooded salt to do?

"I tipped her back, and I kissed that woman as long as I thought I should," he said.

Which was pretty long. The photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt took four frames on an old-fashioned camera.

McDuffie, who is left-handed, used a twist of his wrist to shield the woman's face when he sensed the photographer's approach.

When McDuffie came up for air, the photographer ran away to snap other pictures -- Times Square was beginning to fill up -- and the young sailor took off, too.

The cad. He had a hot date with his girlfriend in Brooklyn.

He and the nurse never exchanged a word.

He missed the original release of the photo in Life magazine; four days after V-J Day, McDuffie boarded a ship named Cape Lookout and stayed gone for months. The war was over, but the work wasn't done.

It was probably 20 years before he saw the photo. He immediately identified two naval buddies in the background -- and, of course, he recognized himself.

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, there were about 10 other fellas claiming to be the photo's jaunty swabbie.

In fact, in 1980, when the magazine sought to identify the sailor and nurse, McDuffie was overlooked in favor of a Rhode Island man named George Mendoza.

"It made me mad," said McDuffie.

But McDuffie is a stubborn old coot. He didn't give up telling everybody who would listen that he was the sailor, not Mendoza.

A radio program invited McDuffie on air to discuss his claim -- but in a classic gotcha move, the host had Mendoza on the other line.

"The radio host asked me if there was anything I wanted to say to Mendoza," McDuffie recalled. He said, "I told him I'd come up there and kick his" butt.

In the 20 years that followed, McDuffie gathered old photos, he passed a lie detector test and, according to his brother Jim, a former state legislator, McDuffie called Life so many times the secretaries there knew him by voice.

Finally he recruited the help of forensic artist and facial reconstructionist Lois Gibson, who went from skeptic to firm believer in McDuffie as the mystery sailor.

"Good Morning America" announced the "definitive" conclusion in August. Well, as definitive as it can be, 62 years after the fact.

McDuffie went to Kannapolis for a visit after appearing on the show. His old race car heroes would call it a victory lap.

McDuffie said he STILL looks like the young sailor in the photo -- "and I'm 80 years old!"

These days, he's a little grayer, a little more ... distinguished.

But a darn sight better than that Mendoza fellow, McDuffie said.

As for the nurse? It's probably a good thing they didn't chat first.

McDuffie said she was the mouthiest woman -- no pun intended -- he's ever encountered.

"Over the years, I had to hang up on her several times," McDuffie said.

Even when he called to tell her that his identity had been verified by the forensic artist and that he was going on "Good Morning America" to be recognized in front of God and everyone, her answer was, "Oh, I bet."

To heck with her, McDuffie said.

He knows the truth.

Diane Sawyer knows.

Now you do, too. It was a North Carolina boy who provided that iconic image of celebration, of an end to war, by kissing a nurse "as long as he thought he should" -- then hopping back on the subway to see his girl.

Happy Fourth of July.