NEW YORK: Little Flower

Reluctantly, last spring, greying Fiorello LaGuardia admitted to himself that he was not well. He was 64, but he awaited a cure with characteristic impatience. As a radio commentator, columnist and freelance oracle, he was as full of furious plans as he had been during his twelve years as mayor of New York. He went to Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai Hospital for an operation in June, hoping to hear that he could soon go on breaking lances against the enormous villains with whom his frenetic world was peopled. Instead, he heard his death sentence—he was suffering from cancer of the pancreas.

For a long time after he left the hospital, few suspected the tryst he kept in his comfortable, $50,000 English-style home in The Bronx. He read voluminously, kept an eye on politics, wrote his weekly opinionated column in the newspaper PM. But last month he warned friends that he would not live much longer. Last week he fell into a coma, slept deeply for four days, rousing only once to drink a little orange juice and to speak a few words with his wife, Marie, and his two adopted children, Jean, 18 and Eric, 15.

Early on the fifth day, just after New York’s skyscrapers caught the shine of a bright blue autumn morning, teletypes clacked in all police stations, ordering flags flown at half-mast. Signal gongs in all firehouses began beating out the 5-5-5-5 rhythm which heralds the death of firemen and of great public servants. Newspapers began spilling off the presses with the black headline: LAGUARDIA DEAD.

Noisy Man. Many a New Yorker found the news hard to believe, like the silence which follows the clatter of a rivet gun. In 32 years in public life, the Little Flower had been damned as a buffoon and a tyrant, praised as a great liberal and an exacting administrator. He had performed miracles of political acrobatics. But New Yorkers had grown to think of him not so much as a political force but as a manifestation of sound and movement—shrill, vehement, energetic and cacophonous, as oddly comforting as the roar of the subway and the bleat of taxi horns.

New Yorkers knew his history. He was born in a tenement on Manhattan’s lower East Side, the son of poor immigrants from Italy. But his father, a musician named Achille LaGuardia, joined the U.S. Army and became bandmaster of the 11th Infantry Regiment; Fiorello’s boyhood was spent in Arizona Army posts. It was a good boyhood. He learned music (all his life he worshiped opera, and as mayor he took delight in leading bands and orchestras). He also rode half-wild range horses and learned early that brashness could be a substitute for size (he was 5 ft. 2 in.).

Sink or Swim. His father died after eating tainted Army beef during the Spanish-American War—a tragedy which set off young Fiorello’s lifelong rage against profiteering, careless government and exploitation. He attacked the unfriendly world with the dash of a Garibaldi.

After a tour of duty in the consular service, he came back to New York, got a job as an interpreter at Ellis Island, studied law at night and began pointing toward politics. In 1916 he ran for Congress as a Republican in a Tammany-controlled district, and amazed everyone except himself by getting elected. In World War I, he was a famous flyer, noted for his baggy uniform, his impatience of protocol and his patriotic speeches to huge Italian audiences.

One Lamb Chop. He kept Congress in an uproar. He railed against Andrew Volstead and his dry law, once concocted home brew in a Harlem drugstore in a fruitless attempt to get himself arrested. During a speech on high prices, he waved a lamb chop at his congressional colleagues. He helped write the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which banned “yellow-dog” labor contracts and strikebreaking by injunction.

Though he was a winning Republican, he was anathema to most G.O.P. leaders. He infuriated party regulars by his association with socialists and other radicals—one of his proteges was Communist-line Vito Marcantonio—and by his refusal to accept Republican platforms. The party’s silk-stocking element was frankly appalled by him—a noisy little man whose feet dangled when he sat on a chair, who needed a shave, who walked in picket lines and smelled of garlic. When he was finally beaten for Congress in 1932, the party sighed with relief. It seemed that his career was over.

Comeback. Actually, it had just begun. When the Seabury Investigation forced dapper Jimmy Walker out of New York’s City Hall, a Fusion Party was born and Fiorello LaGuardia, its candidate for mayor, rode noisily into the third biggest political job in the land. On election night, although he had not yet taken office and had no real authority, he ordered police to send 400 patrol wagons out to bring voting machines to police headquarters—he suspected Tammany henchmen of trying to alter the vote for comptroller. The police obeyed, and the Fusion candidate won. In the next twelve years, the longest period any mayor of New York ever spent in office, life in the great city was seldom dull.

He gathered nicknames—the Little Flower, Butch, The Hat, the Little King. He posed for photographs in gas masks, baseball caps, catcher’s masks, chef’s caps and fireman’s hats. During campaign speeches, he used his horn-rimmed spectacles as sword, scepter and backscratcher; he spat on imaginary apples, kicked imaginary footballs and screeched vulgarly at his enemies. He started a weekly radio program, on which he told housewives how to cook spaghetti, and, during the 1945 newspaper strike, read comics to their offspring.

He infuriated thousands. He was a busybody and an office tyrant, who fired (and rehired) stenographers almost daily, roared epithets at underlings. He was a master at political conniving. He engaged in feuds with City Hall reporters, once had a New York Times man tailed, and triumphantly told the reporter’s boss that he was spending some of his working time at race tracks. Once, in his fury against bookmakers, he asked children to tattle to him when their fathers gambled. He had the candor to admit his shortcomings: “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”

Monuments. But he could be demure, quiet, kindly. He was ferociously honest and recklessly fearless. He was the best mayor New York ever had, and he left great monuments.

New York, practically bankrupt when he took office, was a sound and stable concern when he left. During his twelve years, New York built a new city prison, 67 schools, 262 playgrounds, 14 vast housing projects, two hospitals, great stretches of parkway, the Triborough and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. It bought and consolidated its subway and surface transportation systems, built miles of new underground rail lines. But he had given the city more than material benefits; he had stamped on the serpent of municipal corruption until it moved only faintly; he had proved that “reform mayors” need not end their careers in hopeless frustration.

On the day after his death, silent, shuffling throngs lined the sidewalks outside the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, walked in, passed slowly by his open, candle-flanked coffin. When the cathedral doors were finally closed at 11 o’clock at night, 45,000 people of every race, creed and walk of life had paid a final salute. The next day, 10,000 people jammed the cathedral to attend his funeral. Thousands more stood hatless under overcast skies as his funeral cortege moved with slow music to Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx.

In a message to his widow, President Truman had written what might stand as his epitaph: he was as “incorruptible as the sun.” In its own lingo, New York said it better: “He was a great guy.”