By Kay Sassi, 2000 Winner of the Dolores Capitan Award for Excellence in Writing
Originally written for The Sou'wester
AMERICUS-After twenty-eight years of marriage in a dual-career household, six moves, and two children, what would a woman want for her anniversary gift?
A fur coat, perhaps? A large ring? How about an award that would be given to someone else?
On September 19, 1987 as they celebrated their daughter's engagement and their own wedding anniversary, Dolores Capitan received a very special gift from her husband.
He announced he'd just funded the Dolores Capitan Award for Excellence in Writing at Georgia Southwestern State University.
Writing is a subject close to Capitan's heart though she began her professional life in an entirely different field: nursing.
Born in Nebraska, the second oldest of 10 children, Capitan was hospital-trained as an R.N. Barely out of her teens at the time, she said she recalls hospital duty as " traumatic, and scary, especially when I was on night duty all by myself."
She adds, "in those days, nurses weren't as thoroughly trained as they are now, and I often worried what would happen if a patient took a bad turn and I wouldn't be able to help him."
She said a year in nursing convinced her to think about changing careers.
She considered what she liked best, and realized it was literature.
Shortly thereafter, as a 21-year old freshman at the University of Minnesota, Capitan said she recalls thinking, "I am the luckiest person in the world. I am at college!"
She believes she was lucky in love, as well.
She met her husband, William H. Capitan, at the University hospital where she worked as a nurse while attending classes.
She received her degree in English, and the couple moved several times, living in Maryland, Ohio, and Michigan before arriving in West Virginia.
Having work as a nurse in each state she and her husband had lived, West Virginia proved to be a career turning point for Capitan.
"I was 44 years old," she says, "when I found the job I loved." That job was reporting for The Record Delta of Buckhannon, West Virginia, and it was the first job where she's worked long enough to earn a week's paid vacation.
Capitan says, "I had a wonderful editor during the time I wrote for that paper, but the typesetter wasn't quite as careful."
She remembers writing about a woman whose tow-headed little boy played in her lap throughout the interview.
"I was shocked," she said, "to see my story in print the next day telling readers about the two-headed boy sitting in his mother's lap."
Five years later, Capitan moved to Americus when her husband became President of GSW.
Instead of giving up the work she loved, she became a stringer for The Atlanta Journal writing a monthly article.
She says, "At the time, Jimmy Carter was President, and there was a great deal of interest in this area of the country."
For the next ten years she also edited Garden Gateways, official publication of the Garden Club of Georgia, which has over 15,000 members.
After taking only a year off for a mastectomy and chemotherapy, Capitan went back to work.
She first wrote articles for Georgia Journal, and later, a history of the Garden Club of Georgia from 1988-1998.
That book, recently delivered to the printer, will be published in September 2000.
She follows her own advice saying, "Work that you like is the way to live."
Asked about her preferences in authors and books, she answers, "It's not restful to think of your own life sometimes, so I read for distraction." The works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are on her current "must read" list.
Another distraction for Capitan is a fairly new one: attending the Poetry Slam at Pat's Place in Americus. Her first visit, she says, was almost a challenge. "I stood outside the door, wondering if I dared go in by myself." Glad she made the effort, Capitan says now that her evening at Pat's Place was "the most fun I've ever had."
The Dolores Capitan Award for Excellence in Writing is one legacy for which she will be remembered.
Capitan provided another clue to her character when she said, "Since I first heard these words spoken by Father Stephen Walsh, a former priest at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Americus, I've had them on my refrigerator door: `Live so that when you die the poor, the sick, and the outcast will mourn the passing of a friend.'"
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