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1923. After his parents emigrated to Delaware in 1930, Louis and his brothers, Frank and Vincent, grew up in a whole new world. Joseph Capano, their father, was a bricklayer, and there was plenty of work for a man with his skills, even in the depths of the Depression. The young Capano family settled in New Castle, a few miles south of Wilmington on the Delaware River. Their relatives the Rizzos had a little construction business there and welcomed them. New Castle is the oldest town in America, where even today the cobbled streets and old houses that seem to lean together for support give the impression of stepping back in time hundreds of years. The Capanos lived, however, in a working-class part of town.
    Immigrants from Calabria were sometimes looked down upon by other Italians who had come to America. When they heard that someone was
calabrese,
first-generation Italians from other regions often raised their eyebrows and made the deprecating gesture of aknife across their necks. Calabrese were said to be a hardheaded and stubborn bunch, and some said they were cutthroats. The Capanos, like most Calabrese, were stolid, hardworking, and clannish with family: they ignored the prejudice and set their minds to succeeding in America. Each Capano son chose a trade; Frank became a bricklayer like his father, Vincent a plumber, and Louis a carpenter. Louis was required to serve as an apprentice for four years before he could join the union, and then was hired by the Canterra Construction Company, working long hours summer and winter.
    Family lore has it that Louis’s first job was to build an outhouse, and that he was proud to do it. He was a short, solidly built man who took great pride in his workmanship. Early on, he was known for his honesty and his desire to do a job to the satisfaction of his foreman—and later, for his own customers. He didn’t have a particularly good head for business; he was, instead, an artisan, who loved to see the perfect curve of 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