Franklin Cappon - Family and Death

Family and Death

Cappon married Henrietta Van Putten of Holland, Michigan, and they had their first child, Franklin C. Cappon, Jr., in 1925. They also had a daughter, Mary L. Cappon.

In January 1961, Cappon suffered a mild heart attack, and he was hospitalized again for two weeks in the summer of 1961 with an occlusion in an artery of his left arm. Cappon returned to work at Princeton despite the stress that coaching would put on his heart. On November 29, 1961, Cappon suffered a second heart attack while showering after a basketball practice at Princeton's Dillon Gymnasium. Junior varsity coach, Edward J. Donovan, was in the shower with Cappon at the time, saw Cappon falling and lowered him to the ground. Donovan called for help, and when Cappon's doctor arrived ten minutes later, he found Cappon dead on the floor.

As word of Cappon's death spread around the Princeton campus, it became "one of the saddest days in the lives of anyone connected with Princeton sports in those years," a moment which some compared to the day two years later when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Future U.S. Senator Bill Bradley was a freshman basketball player at the time. One of his teammates found Bradley sitting alone at the Princeton Student Center eating a pint of ice cream after learning of Cappon's death. With a dazed look of grief, Bradley noted, "The two people who brought me here are gone," referring to Cappon and Princeton's director of admissions who had recently retired. In his profile of Cappon, Selden Edwards noted that he'd "never been able to get that image from my mind, of the two naked old men on the tile floor, Silent Ed cradling Cappy Cappon in his arms. Something out of Michelangelo."

Cappon's funeral was held at Princeton University Chapel.