COMING APRIL 2026
That afternoon, 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 would make the front pages of Boston newspapers. The timing of the his 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. After two weeks the baby was placed in foster care, and was later adopted. When he grew up and learned of his troubled start in life, he began a search for his biological parents. After he passed in 1987. his daughter Tina picked up the search. By chance, she found David's 2005 Boston Globe article about the abandonment. A collaboration began and together, with the help of a genealogist, they cracked the case and found the mother. That was when they discovered a surprising coda to the story.
Abandoning Tina’s father was not the most shocking act of her life.
