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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 saying that he was going to hire him.
    “Mr. Capano built us this big white house, but there was something my father wanted him to fix—the curve of our stairway wasn’t quite right. He came back a couple of times—himself—to be sure it was exactly what my father wanted. I remember Mr. Capano standing in our yard, and he wore a trench coat. And he did have something—this
presence
about him. That house is still in good shape.”
    Lou continued to strengthen his reputation as a builder to be trusted. The “DuPonters” poured into Wilmington, and they needed more and more houses. Lou’s banker summed up why he was so respected: “He was the kind of a builder who didn’t play games—he told bankers the truth. If he was having troubles he would tell you. That was a nice thing for a banker, since so many builders tried to hide things and hoped they’d go away. But Lou Capano built the houses too good—and the building business is too cyclical.”
    Lou made deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on a handshake—and he was never known to go back on his word. Any house with his name on it as the builder automatically jumped a few thousand dollars in value. He drove himself, chain-smoking all the time. He expected his boys to work just as hard, and he was a strong patriarch in a typical Italian family. All three sons did their turn with a shovel and pickax working summers for their father. They dug ditches, moved bricks, and drove trucks. Their father wanted them to