Music: Death of Guard

Last week in Manhattan Death came to William John (“Billy”) Guard, 69, for 22 years press representative of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera Company.

As Sunday Editor he gave the New York Times its first rotogravure section. His first press-agenting was done for Oscar Hammerstein’s opera company, which became overnight a threatening rival to the Metropolitan. At the Metropolitan he ignored changing fashions, kept his courtly, old-school ways, his Windsor ties, his tufted goatee, his hair long. His office was a celebrated rendezvous for newspaper-folk. Behind his rolltop desk hung his own definition of relativity— “There is no hitching post in the universe” —across which Albert Einstein wrote last year “Gelesen und richtig befunden.”