The first politician I really remember is Fiorello La Guardia, and what a memory that is to have. I wasn’t even ten years old on the day we met him in 1936. He stood just five foot two, barely taller than I was at the time. To this day, he is the standard by which I instinctively measure all politicians.
La Guardia (nicknamed “the Little Flower,” which is the meaning of Fiorello in English) was a Republican who loved FDR and the New Deal, a progressive who took on Tammany Hall and Democratic political corruption, an Italian American who took on Lucky Luciano and organized crime. La Guardia was the product of an ethnic stew in his own family, with an Italian Catholic father and Triestine Jewish mother, and he reached out with respect and jobs to uplift the new immigrants who were flooding into New York. You can still see his hand on the amazing, aging infrastructure of modern New York.
My uncle Frank Suraci, my mother’s brother, was a staunch Republican who helped deliver votes for La Guardia in our neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, during the 1933 election for mayor. Uncle Frank had often arranged for my older brother, Johnny, to sing at local Republican functions (people called Johnny “Little Caruso”).
When La Guardia was elected mayor, Uncle Frank was rewarded with the job of library commissioner for the borough of Queens. Politics or show business, it never hurts to do favors.
One of Fiorello La Guardia’s promises as mayor was to complete the Triborough Bridge, which would connect Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Construction had begun in 1929, but was suspended after the stock market crash and the United States sinking into the Great Depression. Because La Guardia had cemented a working relationship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had come into the White House shortly before La Guardia was elected, he convinced him to commit millions of dollars from the New Deal’s new Public Works Administration to finish the bridge. In a way, the bridge’s completion declared that New York was back in business.
The ribbon to open the bridge was to be cut on July 11, 1936. President Roosevelt spoke from a podium. Uncle Frank, as usual, arranged the entertainment. Around that time, my brother, Johnny’s, voice began to change with adolescence. He gave up singing just as I was getting seriously interested in music and songs. (Inspired by my brother’s example, I had begun to sing, too, although Johnny sang opera, while I mostly sang pop tunes. A great teacher at my grade school, Mrs. McQuade, took an interest in me and my singing and drawing. She made me feel talented and special. Mrs. McQuade had arranged for me to sing a few times at the local Democratic club, which, as I look back on it, must have put Uncle Frank in an awkward position.)
But Uncle Frank gave me my first Republican gig, when he arranged for me to sing at the bridge opening ceremony, three weeks before my tenth birthday. I wore a little white silk suit stitched by my mother. I wound up standing next to Mayor La Guardia as he cut the ribbon and sang “Marching Along Together” (“Singing all along the line / What do we care for weather? / We’ll be there in rain or shine”) as the mayor and I and thousands of other people walked over the bridge.
The biggest man in town (even though he was just five foot two) and a little boy in a white suit opening a great bridge. What a day when you’re not even ten years old—or ninety.
La Guardia was such a bright, bustling, dynamic presence. He loved people. You sensed that although he enjoyed the attention he received on the public stage, he was on that stage to help people. As much as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia gave people hope in fearful times. All of us who are onstage for a living can hope that, now and again, we can do that, too.
The Triborough Bridge that Mayor La Guardia and I opened in 1936 was officially renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in 2008, although most New Yorkers still call it the Triborough. But I want to take advantage of my “special relationship” with that bridge to say I think the name change is fine and fitting. Robert F. Kennedy was one of the few politicians who ever measured up to Fiorello La Guardia.
Tuscany