August 2006
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Day August 27, 2006

Entries 2 Total

RIP

Aug 27, ’06 8:50 PM

My parents were worried when Dr. and Mrs. Capers moved in next door; the house they built was shaped like an ark. “Do they know something we don’t?” Mom wondered.

The Capers helped me grow up (sorta like in loco grandparentis) and they showed an awful lot of kindness to my mom after Dad left. Dr. Augustus T. Capers died on Thursday, at the age of 87, after a full life.

Update:

I went to the funeral today in Paterson. The program included the following:

Reflections of Life

Augustus Theodore Capers was born on September 30, 1918 in Charleston, SC, the son of Wade and Anna Morris Simmons. When he was a young child, his mother died and he was raised by his great aunt, Florence Capers, and her husband. They moved to Paterson, NJ with Augustus at the age of 5 years. On Thursday, August 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m., he entered into eternal rest while watching the sun rise.

In 1943, he graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Science in Biology. He received his Doctor of Dentistry from the Dental College of Howard University in 1947 and achieved further distinction with the highest score on the NJ Dental Examination in 1948. This began his dental career in Paterson, which extended over 50 years. During the Korean War he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Dental Corps and was honorably discharged.

Dr. Capers and his wife Gertrude were champions of civil rights. They founded the first black democratic club in the city of Paterson. Both served the community by advancing equality in housing and employment opportunities within the City Administration, the Board of Education and the Police Department of Paterson. Dr. Capers was appointed as the first black dentist to serve on the dental staff of the Paterson school system by the mayor. In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey sent congratulatory greetings as Dr. Capers was the first black State Assemblymen elected by the citizens of Passaic County, District 14-B, who elected him to a second term. During this same year, he was elected to serve as a member of the Board of Directors for the Paterson Boy’s Club. Dr. Capers was honored by the Bergen-Passaic Howard University Alumni Club and his fellow Paterson Kiwanis Club members for his commitment to community service, consumer advocacy, justice and equality.

His ties to the Paterson community remained strong in his twilight years when Dr. Capers and Gertrude retired to Ringwood, NJ. Both he and his wife, a published author, were honored by the Paterson Public Library. Her poignant memoir, “A Scent from the Blue Ridge,” (under the pen name Trudi Capers) serves as a tribute to her husband’s accomplishments and a reflection of the history and the genesis of the civil rights movement in the City of Paterson, while tracing her family’s roots from slave and American Indian ancestry. In September 2002, Dr. Capers and Gertrude celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with family and friends.

He leaves to cherish his memory: his beloved wife, Gertrude Stanton Capers; three children, artist Selena James, Superior Court Judge Michelle Hollar-Gregory, and financial consultant Augustus T. Capers, Jr.; as well as three grandchildren, Dr. Robert A. James, Jr., and Ryan and Kyle Hollar-Gregory; sons-in-law Robert A. James, Sr. and Milton R. Hollar-Gregory, esq.; nieces Betty and Virginia; nephews Vreeland and Melville; and many cousins, other family members and friends.

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C’est Levee, or Once More Unto the Breach

Aug 27, ’06 10:19 AM

It’s the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s whomping of the Gulf Coast. I’ve been down to New Orleans four times since then. I’ve tried to chronicle a little bit of the reconstruction, or at least my viewpoint on the progress.

My perspective is limited, of course. Amy’s family lives about 25 miles from the city, so the people I see the most down there talk more about the after-effects, not their own property loss. We’ve made trips into the city each visit, but mainly in the central business district and the French Quarter. I haven’t gone through the lower Ninth Ward in any of my visits, but I also don’t visit the South Bronx when I go to New York.

Or does the WTC site serve as a better analogy? Ray Nagin seemed to think so, when he contrasted NOLA’s rebuilding pace with the five-year span since the Twin Towers were knocked down: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

It was a cheap shot, but Nagin’s a mentally unstable grandstander, so that needs to be factored in.

How does the city get rebuilt? Darned if I know. I wouldn’t exactly trust a “master plan” developed by the crooked politicos of Louisiana in concert with the ass-clowns in Washington, and the Army Corps of Engineers is already covering its ass about the possibility of the current levees being unable to handle another major storm. I’m having enough trouble just trying to settle on a color for my home office, since the official VM wife objects pretty violently to the deep green currently in place.

(Witold Rybczynski in Slate has a neat piece about how a new-urbanist project in Denver provides an example of how to start putting together neighborhoods, but it all presupposes that the neighborhoods aren’t built in a locale that’s existentially flood-prone.)

I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say that I haven’t gotten at already, so why don’t you, my dear readers, tell me what you make of New Orleans? A bunch of you came to visit in March for my wedding, but I want to hear from those of you who haven’t seen it, too. Tell me what you remember of the city, if you’ve been there before, what you thought if you’ve been there post-Katrina, and what you think of the ways and means of rebuilding a city that wasn’t in great shape before it’s cataclysm.

(Update: I know it’s hard to believe, but Ray Nagin has more to say!)

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