Early Life and Career
LaGuardia was born in Greenwich Village in New York City to two Italian immigrant parents. His father, Achille La Guardia, was a lapsed-Catholic from Cerignola, and his mother, Irene Coen, was a Jew from Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his maternal grandmother Fiorina Luzzatto Coen was a Luzzatto, a member of the prestigious Italian Jewish family of scholars, kabbalists and poets and had among her ancestors the famous rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto better known as Shadal. It was in Trieste that Achille La Guardia met and married Irene . Fiorello La Guardia was raised an Episcopalian and practised that religion all his life. His middle name “Enrico” was changed to “Henry” (the English form of Enrico) when he was a child.
He moved to Arizona with his family, where his father had a bandmaster position at Fort Whipple in the U.S. Army. LaGuardia attended public schools and high school in Prescott, Arizona. After his father was discharged from his bandmaster position in 1898, Fiorello lived in Trieste.
La Guardia joined the State Department and served in U.S. consulates in Budapest, Trieste (Italy), and Fiume (Austria-Hungary), now Rijeka (Croatia), (1901–1906). He returned to the U.S. to continue his education at New York University. In 1907–10, he worked for New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as an interpreter for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration at the Ellis Island immigrant station.
He graduated from New York University School of Law in 1910, was admitted to the bar the same year, and began a law practice in New York City.
Read more about this topic: Fiorello La Guardia
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one’s eyes. It becomes its symbol.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)