Months after Dr. Cavazos’ departure, the Justice Department said it was investigating his wife’s use of frequent-flier mileage that he had accumulated as secretary. His wife, Peggy Ann Cavazos, a former nurse, had held no official position but had gone with her husband to work every day, attended meetings, helped edit his speeches and policy papers, and accompanied him on trips. Officials later said that no charges had been filed and that the investigation had been quietly dropped.
Lauro Fred Cavazos Jr. was born on Jan. 4, 1927, the oldest of five children of Lauro Sr. and Tomasa (Quintanilla) Cavazos, whose ancestors settled in Texas long before it became a state in 1845. Lauro and his siblings were born on the King Ranch, the state’s largest spread, near Kingsville. It is now a National Historic Landmark.
His father was the foreman for the ranch’s showcase Santa Gertrudis cattle, and his mother was descended from Francita Alavez, the “Angel of Goliad,” who saved the lives of many Texas prisoners in the Texas Revolution, a rebellion against Mexico in 1835-36.
The siblings spoke English to their father and Spanish to their mother, and attended a two-room schoolhouse on the ranch for the children of King laborers. Starting in 1935, they went to public schools in Kingsville. After graduation from high school in 1945, Lauro joined the Army and served in the stateside infantry in the last days of World War II. One of his brothers, Richard E. Cavazos, who died in 2017, became the first Hispanic four-star general of the Army.
At Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Lauro Cavazos earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1949 and a master’s in zoological cytology, the study of cells, in 1951. He earned a doctorate in physiology in 1954 at Iowa State University.
In 1954, he married Peggy Ann Murdock. They had 10 children: Lauro III, Sarita, Ricardo, Alicia, Victoria, Roberto, Rachel, Veronica, Tomas and Daniel. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.
Dr. Cavazos taught anatomy for a decade at the Medical College of Virginia (now part of Virginia Commonwealth University), rising to associate professor and serving on the editorial board of the college’s medical quarterly. In 1964, he joined Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston as a professor and as the chairman of the anatomy department. He was also dean of the medical school from 1975 to 1980.