On 15 August 1945, as church bells rang, sirens wailed, and crowds flooded the streets of Boston to celebrate the end of the World War II, an act of quiet desperation unfolded in plain sight. Amid the largest party the city had ever known, a well‑dressed young woman approached a teenage newsboy sitting on a bench on Boston Common. She asked him to hold her baby while she ran a quick errand. She pressed two dollars into his hand. Then she disappeared into the jubilant crowd and was never seen again.

The abandoned infant would soon be known to the city as “Little Mister Victory”—a name given by nurses who cared for him in the days following VJ Day. His story captured the hearts of Bostonians in the summer of 1945, then faded from public memory almost as quickly as it appeared. Decades later, his daughter would reopen the mystery, uncovering a family history more complex, shocking, and poignant than anyone could have imagined.

This is the remarkable true story told in Little Mister Victory.

Joy and relief are abundant in this screenshot from the Army Signal Corps film taken in downtown Boston on VJ Day. (National Archives)

Boston’s newspapers seized upon the story immediately. A baby abandoned on the Common—on VJ Day of all days—was irresistible. Reporters framed the story as both tragedy and symbol, contrasting the nation’s joy with a mother’s despair.

Photographs of nurses holding the baby ran prominently on front pages. The public followed every update: his condition, his clothing, the efforts to locate his mother. Nurses at Boston City Hospital nicknamed him Little Mister Victory, a bittersweet tribute to the day he was found.

Police pursued leads across New England. Footprint impressions were circulated to hospitals. Sightings were reported from Maine to New York. Nothing came of them. Within two weeks, the story began to fade from the headlines as the world’s attention turned toward rebuilding after the war.

But for the baby, the consequences were permanent.

An uncredited Boston Record photographer captured Sergeant (and grandfather) John Tesoraro cradling Little Mister Victory at Boston City Hospital the evening of the baby’s abandonment. (Courtesy Boston Herald)

From the front page of the Boston Record, August 15, 1945, this is nurse Eileen Resmini of Boston City Hospital holding Little Mister Victory the evening of his abandonment. (Print courtesy of the Ryan family)