Then the unthinkable happened...
Sixteen year-old newsboy Charles Spataro was watching the celebration, waiting to begin his shift at the nearby Park Street subway station when a woman - a stranger to him - asked if he would watch her baby while she performed an errand. She pressed two dollars into his hand and she promised to return shortly.
She never did.
During a week in which the most deadly and costly war in American history had finally ended, the story of the abandoned baby made the front page of several Boston papers. The timing of the baby’s abandonment was not lost on war-weary Americans, and several papers took to calling the boy “Little Mr. Victory” a nickname which endeared him to the hearts of Bostonians.
Neither the mother or father ever came forward, the baby was placed in foster care. Adopted, he would later learn of his troubled beginning and search for his mother until his passing in 1987. One of his daughters would pick up the search and, later, connect with a Boston historian. Together with a genealogist they would crack the case and discover a surprising coda to the story.