Father of New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia.

Mr. La Guardia, a musician, became a bandmaster in the United States Army and the La Guardias from that time lived on government reservations, chiefly in the West. The future Mayor of New York passed his boyhood days at Fort Whipple, Arizona.

During the Spanish-American War the elder La Guardia was sent to Tampa, Fla., with his regiment, and his family accompanied him. While there, young Fiorello, then 15 years old, obtained a job as correspondent of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. One of the items he sent to the newspaper at that time was a brief notice of his father's death. The elder La Guardia died from eating "embalmed" beef, issued as part of the Army rations. The genesis of La Guardia's zeal in exposing official corruption may be traced to this tragedy of his youth. While in Congress he introduced a bill providing the death penalty for anyone convicted of fraud in selling materials to the government in wartime.