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What New Jersey needs
in another LaGuardia
of TheColumnists.com
This is my new home:
New Jersey--the Garden state, beautiful beaches, wonderful sports
stadiums, terrific theaters, fine restaurants, good highways
to everywhere, especially nearby New York City.
And corruption. More corruption per square inch than a John Gotti
meeting in his old neighborhood clubhouses.
The latest example of New Jersey’s crime slime was the roundup
last month of more than 40 public figures, mayors, contractors
and half a dozen bearded rabbis charged with graft, under the
table payoffs, illegal contributions and the best of it all,
allegedly selling organs for transplant.
What a state.
I’m a New Yorker by birth and professional experience. Sure,
NYC had its criminals, its murderers, its double dealers, its
sleaze bags, its hit men and its con artists. Politicians often
went to jail. The excuse was its population, some eight or nine
million, depending on the counters. You have to have a few bad
apples in a barrel that big.
All of this made me think back some six or seven decades, depending
on the counter, to my greatest political hero.
He was Fiorello H. La Guardia, the 99th Mayor of New York City--from
1934 through 1945. I fell in love with him in 1945 when I was
an impressionable 13 year old newspaper junkie. We read six or
seven newspapers daily in my house starting with the back pages
of the News, the Mirror and the Post, where all the sports information
about my Brooklyn Dodgers could be found.
I also read the comics daily and Sunday--Dick Tracy, Terry and
the Pirates, Popeye and the rest. Then came the big newspaper
strike. No sports. At least we could stay up with our team via
radio. No comics. No way to get that.
Wait a minute. The Little Flower stepped in. He read the color
comics on Sunday mornings from the original sheets provided by
the striking papers. He had a squeaky, gravelly voice with all
the theatrics of a John Barrymore. He provided all the voices,
all the drama, all the excitement that a kid could want from
a collection of comics.
La Guardia was a strange ethnic combination of an Italian Catholic
father, a bandmaster in the U.S. Army and an Italian-Jewish mother
from Trieste. He was raised as an Episcopalian. Then again he
wasn’t really raised because he barely stood over five feet
tall.
He attended New York University, worked for various social agencies,
served in Congress, ran unsuccessfully for Mayor against scandalous
Jimmy Walker, served as a flyer in World War I and finally made
it to the top city job in 1934.
He was incredibly moral and honest and hated the stigma his fellow
Italians faced by the growing New York City crime problem. His
first action as Mayor was to order his police chief to arrest
arrogant mobster Lucky Luciano.
“Let’s drive the bums out of town,” La Guardia
announced.
Luciano was arrested on a tax charge and as a prostitution ring
operator, sent to jail and deported back to his native Italy.
La Guardia then went after Frank Costello and destroyed his slot
machine business, which was stealing money from the poor. Photos
of La Guardia breaking up the machines with sledge hammers and
dumping them in the East River filled newspaper photo sections
for days.
He boosted New York City’s struggling Depression economy
in the 1930s with public works projects, mostly administered
by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, the true villain in the move
of the Dodgers from decrepit Ebbets Field to glossy Dodger Stadium
in Los Angeles. Nobody’s perfect.
He warned Americans early of the threat Hitler presented to the
world, especially to his Jewish brethren, was a Franklin Roosevelt
supporter despite being a registered Republican, worked hard
to encourage philanthropy, encouraged volunteerism in the city,
spoke endlessly before civic groups and promoted New York City
as the economic and social center of the country.
He was an early advocate of flight and encouraged the development
of two New York City airports, Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn
and the aptly named LaGuardia airport in Queens.
Mostly, La Guardia was a bombastic, uplifting personality with
never a hint of scandal around his historic career. He was a
walking definition of the classic, if lost term, public servant.
If he lived in New Jersey in today’s times, La Guardia would
have kicked out all of the bums arrested last month before they
had a chance to steal from the public coffers. He believed integrity,
honesty and service was integral to a politician’s character.
Sure, he read the comics to me as a kid. That’s probably
why I loved him so. But being damned honest didn’t hurt,
either.
©2009 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Aug. 10, 2009.
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