Floyd Gibbons was a noted war correspondent who wore a patch over the eye he lost while reporting on World War I in France. He died Sept. 24, 1939, of a heart attack. His death cut short plans to return to Europe to report on the outbreak of hostilities in World War II. He had roved the world as an ace reporter and was shipwrecked and wounded along the way. Gibbons first made a name for himself as a war correspondent when he reported Villa's raid on Columbus, N.M., in March 1916. He later accompanied Gen. John Pershing on his dash into Mexico on a punitive expedition. As an aftermath, he wrote a widely published series of articles disclosing poorly equipped state troops on the Mexican border. He became a London correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in 1917. As a passenger on the S.S. Laconia, which was torpedoed and sunk off the Irish coast the night of Feb. 25, 1917, Gibbons cabled a 4,000-word account of the disaster in which American lives were lost. He reported on World War I in France and lost his eye at the Battle of Chateau-Thierry. He was born in Washington, D.C., July 16, 1887. He attended Gonzaga College and Georgetown University. Gibbons began his newspaper work on the Minneapolis Daily News in 1907 and later worked on the Milwaukee Free Press and the Minneapolis Tribune. Gibbons also covered part of Italy's conquest of Ethiopia in 1932. He was stationed in Shanghai, from where he covered the beginning of the Japanese invasion of Manchukuo.