NEW YORK: General Butch

In World War I, New York City’s bouncy little Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia was a ball of buna in the U.S. Air Service. From his base in Italy, he soared on bombing raids over the Alps, haggled with his superiors, smuggled steel out of Spain, cracked protocol like crockery.

Last week the New York Daily News’s George Dixon discovered that Butch LaGuardia, now 60, would also bounce his 175-lb. around in World War II. The President was ready to sign an order commissioning him as a brigadier general. Wrote Reporter Dixon: “The order suggests that Army doctors blink at whatever spavins, heaves, or horsecollar sores the wild Mayor may have and pass him if he is able to stand on his feet.”

The Mayor will probably be sent to North Africa as an administrator of conquered territory, eventually may be U.S. administrator of a liberated Italy. New Yorkers have found nine years of the Little Flower, scolding, sulking, racing to fires, waving his cowboy hat, chasing after bingo players, a little too strenuous. Italians, weary of their high officials’ maestoso struttings, might take Butch’s pizzicato to their hearts.