...And Never Let HerGo

attended Archmere. Tommy was not only a superior student, he was student council president and a star on Archmere’s football team. He was undeniably his parents’ favorite child, quiet and conservative like his father, hardworking, and disciplined. Father Thomas A. Hagendorf, one of his teachers at Archmere Academy, recalled that “Thomas was a shining star.”
    Tommy always seemed to do everything first—and best—but Louie, two years younger, didn’t resent his big brother. Rather, he idolized him. Tommy was good to him, someone he could always go to for advice. They each had distinctive personalities and a different circle of friends. Louie was the charmer who could work a roomful of strangers and leave with a bunch of new friends. He already had the attributes that would one day give him the Midas touch.
    The priests at Archmere were nervous about the effect the sixtieswould have on the adolescent boys they supervised. One headmaster wrote with relief, “Through the anxious, emotional, and intellectual years of the sixties, Archmere kept to a sane course, adhering to its philosophy of teaching religious, academic, and moral fundamentals, while at the same time improving the quality of its course offerings.”
    The Capanos had always invited their parish priests, especially their beloved Father Roberto Balducelli, who had been pastor at St. Anthony’s for twenty-five years, home for dinner or for weekends at the shore, and the Archmere priests were brought into the family, too.
    As always, the boys’ friends were welcome in the Capano home. Blair Mahoney, whose father was Dave Mahoney of the Four Aces, the top-ten vocal group whose records swept America in the early to mid-fifties, was one of Tom’s best friends. While the Four Aces were traveling the country singing “Tell Me Why” and “Stranger in Paradise,” Blair virtually lived with the Capanos during summers at Wildwood, and in Wilmington, too, when he and Tommy went to Archmere. “Mrs. Capano was like a mother to me,” Mahoney recalled. “I wasn’t the easiest young man to manage. She did great keeping me in line.”
    Although Archmere was then strictly a school for young men, coeducational dances were held there, and an invitation to attend was much to be desired by teenage girls in Delaware and New Jersey. Tommy was especially close to his cousin Donna, his aunt Mary Rizzo’s daughter, and he often invited her and her girlfriends to the Archmere dances. The hall where the dances were held was fairly prosaic and it was the cachet of Archmere that drew them. That, and Tommy Capano.
    “He was so handsome then,” Donna’s friend Emily Hensel remembered. “He was just about anything a teenaged girl could want—good looking, popular, and a football star. I can close my eyes even today and see Tommy dancing on the floor. For some reason, the song I hear in my head when I think of Tommy is ‘Time Won’t Let Me,’ by the Outsiders. It was
his
song—at least in my own memory.”
    Tommy was always known as the good brother, the dependable brother. Marguerite and Lou were proud of all of their boys, but Tommy was the one they could count on. Marian was in college, studying to be a psychologist, but she was only a girl, after all, and it was to his sons that Lou looked for his immortality.
    For some reason, perhaps by their own private agreement, Tommy always drove a black sports car and Louie had a white one.Everyone who lived in Brandywine Hundred hung out at the Charcoal Pit on the Concord Pike. It was a hamburger joint not unlike any other teenage hangout in America, but the charcoal-grilled burgers and the fancy ice cream floats, and most of all the ambiance, packed it every night and especially on weekends. When the Capano boys drove up in their new cars, young hearts beat a little faster. The Capano brothers cruised the boardwalk and the strip at the shore when the family summered in Wildwood, so tanned and good looking and sure of themselves.
    In prep school, Tommy seemed unattainable for most girls. He was polite and friendly enough, but it seemed a given that he would choose a girl that everyone wanted. “I remember him in his black convertible,” a Wilmington woman recalled. “He was dating this really rich girl—beautiful, of course—but I can’t even remember her name. She lived in a house that was basically Tara, with the white pillars and all. Tommy’s car would be parked out in front. I knew then that he was kind