As Death Month winds down, I thought it would be fitting to recall my memories of one of the month's victims, my father's friend from childhood, Cap Hancock, aka Lawrence Hancock and Judge Hancock. I remember vividly Cap at my father's funeral. He was a tall man, over six feet, and he put his arm around my much shorter Uncle Ed and walked out of the church with him. A year later he read a poem at my father's grave. He and his wife were frequent guests of the O'Leary parties and I also remember one time he and his wife had traveled to Clermont State Park and approached for a tour just at the closing time. I was standing behind the guide that answered the door as they were told the house was closed, they couldn't come in. I had to smile as he grandly remarked "I've been thrown out of better places than this", as he and his wife walked away. But I got to know Cap best the last two years of his life, when we were pen pals.

Cap was in a nursing home in Beacon. My brother was a frequent visitor and coveyer of books for Cap to read. He loved to read and had read his favorites Dickens and Doyle over and over. I gave my brother some of Anne Morrow Lindberg's Diaries to read and that's how the correspondence began. From February 2002 until late in 2003 we exchanged letters. I received 16 in all.

At first he just talked about Anne's books and the Lindberg's and what he remembered of that time. But every now and then he added something about his childhood and a clue to what my own father's life was like in those years. "Glenham boys don't cry or wear hats in the winter'', he wrote. "They never learn how to dance", although he said he had to learn how to waltz when he was in a play in his senior year. And he did admit to a tear reading Dicken's Dombey at the death of poor little Paul Dombey. Also, he confessed to reading a "girl's book" Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking glass although he said he never told his friends he read it. Mark Twain had been a childhood favorite and Cap wrote that he imagined Hannibal (Twain's home that he wrote about in Tom Sawyer) seemed a lot like Glenham in my youth.

He would recommend books to me that he was reading..Mornings on Horseback, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He admired Teddy and said that Teddy had been heartbroken when he learned his father that he idolized had hired a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War. Books were his passion and his pastime in the years in the nursing home. As they seemed to have always been - he told me he had read Oliver Twist when he was 9 years old.

Some of his letters contained information on his years as Judge in the Glenham Courthouse. He said lawyers were "lots of talk" and he kept himself awake by doing isometric exercises and repeating silently the Avogadro's Hypothesis, "Equal volumes of all gases....". He recalled one time when he had poison ivy from his waist down and he couldn't stop squirming on the bench. My brother told me once that Cap had told him about a young person who came before him with a ring in her nose. He thought her nose was running and handed her his handkerchief. He was a judge longer than any one else in the state as I recall.

He wrote a little about being in the war, had he had earned M-1 rifle medals and then added "my dear wife let my Robert (his son) have the medals to play soldier with. For all I know they are now on the bottom of the creek" and added "crick" as they say in Glenham.

I once was at the nursing home visiting Aunt Lillian who was there for only a few days. He wasn't in his room, but I peeked in and saw piles of books on the window sill and on the floor. He had a reputation as a "ladies man" and the nurses warned Aunt Lillian to beware of him. Not the picture I had of him reading Dickens aloud in his very theatrical voice. He died on February 10, 2004. I am happy I was able to share a little of his history those last years. He liked to write that we shared several things, both Bard graduates, both Leos (his birthday a day before mine) and both readers. Rest in peace, Cap.