...And Never Let HerGo

a banister, the seamless appearance of dovetailed boards.
    Louis Capano was still an apprentice carpenter when he met Marguerite Moglioni, the girl who would become his wife. Marguerite’s mother, Assunta, had been married to a man named Pacelli first, and divorced—shocking for an Italian Catholic in the twenties—before she married Thomas Moglioni, a stonemason. Thomas accepted Assunta’s son, Antony, and they had three children together: Mary, Marguerite, and Renaldo. They lived on Seventh Street near Rodney in Wilmington’s Little Italy neighborhood. Thomas Moglioni did a lot of the stonework on St. Anthony’s Church, the church that for decades would be central to the Italians who lived in Wilmington.
    In the early days, Wilmington’s Italian community was almost a city unto itself, and everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else. A woman who grew up there recalled, “In nice weather, we wandered around the streets—we all did. I lived up on Rodney, and the Moglionis lived down the street. My friend’s mother was a nurse and she gave shots to Assunta, so we would go, too. Of course, they spoke mostly Italian, so I never understood what they were saying—but the food was wonderful!”
    In those days, children had to be Italian to get into St. Anthony’s grade school and St. Anthony of Padua, the high school. And no matter
where
you lived in the city, if you were Italian, you went to Padua.
    This was the background that Marguerite and Louis came from, and their values were similar. Their lives were wrapped around St. Anthony’s Church, and they expected that they would have to work hard to get anywhere in the world. Marguerite wasslender and very pretty, with dark-fringed blue eyes and soft hair that she wore short and feathered around her face. The couple was barely twenty, and poor, when they married. Deeply devout Catholics, they looked forward to having as many children as God sent them.
    Their first child was a girl: Marian, born July 29, 1944. She was a pretty little thing with curly dark hair. Five years later came Thomas Joseph—named for his two grandfathers—born October 11, 1949. Louis Jr. was born two years after that, on October 24, 1951, and a year to the day later, Joseph. Although all of the Capano boys had October birthdays, they looked nothing alike, nor were their personalities similar. They were, however, very close to one another.
    In the forties, Louis and Marguerite lived on the Du Pont Highway—Route 13. It wasn’t a very good neighborhood, but it was what they could afford at the time. When Marian was three, Louis Sr. went into business with Emilio Capaldi. They formed the Consolidated Construction Company and specialized in store and office remodeling and renovations. The men would remain friends for life, a friendship forged working side by side for long hours. Lou Capano was an excellent finish carpenter.
    Lou and Marguerite raised their family in the modest little house out on Route 13, and Lou’s first office was a small place, but that all changed with the tremendous demand for housing after World War II. Consolidated Construction became Capaldi and Capano, and they began to build homes for the influx of young professionals who flocked to Wilmington to work for the DuPont company. Emilio did the architectural drawings and planned the subdivisions, and Lou oversaw the jobs.
    Capaldi and Capano built good, solid houses, and almost overnight new neighborhoods sprang up in the north end of Wilmington. They were all built by the two Italian contractors, but they had English-sounding names like Galewood, Boulder Brook, Canterbury Hills, and Westminster.
    Lou had the callused hands and thick forearms of a real builder. There were many who told him he could show a lot more profit if he wasn’t so determined to deliver top quality. But at heart he was still a custom builder, an artist with wood and stone. He could not bring himself to cut corners even if he was the only one who would know that the floor joists were close enough together to meet the highest standard or that the studs behind the walls were the best grade.
    “I remember seeing Louis Sr. when I was thirteen,” a longtime Wilmington resident recalled. “My dad hired him to build our house, and my dad wasn’t that easy to please. He’d gone to meet Mr. Capano and the architect. He came home and he said—talking about Mr. Capano—‘He’s very disarming, isn’t he?’ and that was my father’s way of