Submitte by: Dan Rich

Giacomo Guidi

South Bend Tribune 2/6/1923

The funeral of Giacome Guidi will be held at 2 o’clock Wednesday afternoon from St. Bavo’s Catholic Church, Rev. A, Schoehaert officiating.

Burial in St. Joseph Cemetery.

Mishawaka Enterprise – Friday Feb. 8, 1923

With the passing of Giacomo Guidi, whose burial occurred in St. Joseph Cemetery here Wednesday afternoon, the Italian colony of Mishawaka lost one of its most important leaders and the people of that quarter of the city which has its center at Spring and Tenth Streets, bade farewell to one of the district’s best known benefactors.

Giacomo Guidi had been a resident of Mishawaka for 11 years, was one of the first of those who came here from the Latin peninsula in 1912, to secure citizenship papers and learn the language of his adopted land.

Always interested in his fellow countrymen and one of the most ardent advocates of better understanding between the immigrant and the native-born, he recognized the need for organization to effect those ends as well as to be of assistance to Italian families in time of distress.

Accordingly, in 1917, he with a party of associates founded the Edmundo de Amicis Aid society here, an extension of Italian-born residents. The original membership of 17 men has grown in a little more than five years to 110, with Guidi as one of the ablest lieutenants of Luigi Zavelloni, the society’s president.

Many of Guidi’s fellow members in the Mutual Aid Society as well as of the Italian Liberty Club, of which the addressed was also a founder, having donated $280 toward its establishment, knew their absent member from the days in the village of Cesena on the plains of the province of Forli, when they played together as farmer boys and watched the plumber abd gray-bersaglieri troops go marching by. It was from this province that Mussolini, leader of the fascisti, came.

Before coming to America a dozen years ago, “Jack” as the deceased was almost universally known by his fellow  - Italians and Americans alike – served for 32 months in the Italian artillery forces with barracks first at Florence and afterward at Turin.

It was a depressed little group of men who sat around the tables of the Aid Society’s club rooms on West Tenth street last night, recalling memories of their past leader’s deeds.

They told how Guidi used to go out at dawn and leave big ripe tomatoes from his little garden, on the porches of those residents of the neighborhood whom he knew to be in need. They recalled how he used to send cans of fruit and vegetables, and meat and bread to both Americans and Italian-born families in the dead of winter when illness or unemployment had stricken whole households.

They sent for Postmaster-elect Ralph Gaylor Wednesday and asked that the postmaster-elect, whom all of them know as “sindico” (the Italian word for mayor), come to the last rites for their deceased comrade at St. Bavo’s Catholic Church.

Seldom has any foreign colony known so impressive a ceremony as marked the funeral of Giacomo Guidi. Fifty-one automobiles stood parked for blocks around St. Bavo’s where about 500 friends from every section of the city came to pay their final respects to the deceased.

One touring car was heaped high with scores of massive floral pieces, and another was partly filled with wreaths and sprays. About 100 were present from other cities – South Bend, Detroit, Chicago and Logansport.

At the grave in St. Joseph Cemetery, the Mutual Aid Society’s officers read impressively their final ritual and sprinkled rose petals into the final resting place of him destined to repose in the soil of his adopted country.

Editor: Note the spelling difference in his name from the South Bend Tribune and the Mishawaka Enterprise. Further his cemetery marker spells his name as Jacobino Guidi