Mrs. Frances Angeline Caponigro

June 4, 1926 - January 14, 2012

Frances Angeline Caponigro (nee Parma), beloved mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, passed away early in the morning of January 14, 2012, at the age of 85 after a long battle with Alzheimer's. Born in Missouri in 1926 to Nora Agnes DeClue and Italian immigrant Pasquale “Patsy” Parma, Frances lost her mother at an early age and was moved to prohibition-era Chicago, Illinois. There, she was raised--“Taylor Street style, as she would say--by her aunt and uncle. She often told stories of that era, about mobsters,bootleggers, bookies, and even tea with Al Capone’s mother, entertaining all of her friends and family for all of her years. As a teenager during the Great Depression, she was forced to work many jobs, including that of a cost clerk for AT&T. During World War II she aided the war effort by working in a factory packing machetes in olive oil to ship them to our boys in the Pacific. She ended up marrying a veteran of the European campaign after the war in 1946. For 40 years she was married to Lawrence Rocco Caponigro until the time of his death in 1986. Together, they had three children whom she is survived by: Jess, Nora, and Linda. Their children in turn gave them a total of ten grandchildren (Jess and Laura; Kerry, Kasey, and Kevin; Bryan, Becky, Jason, Anthony, and Kimmie), and so far those grandchildren have given her ten great grandchildren (Hannah, Owen, and Nicolas; Carlos and Gianna; Ava and Cade; Liam; Anakin and Scout). She cared about all of them deeply. After getting married, she worked plenty of jobs, most notably as the owner/operator of a Winchell’s Donut House through the 60s and 70s in Orange County, California, and then at Beckman Instruments, handling operations in their cafeteria until her retirement in 1988. Upon her retirement, she spent her time traveling, gambling, playing card games, spending time with her family, and whiling away the hours online, chatting long distance with friends old and new through the miracles of Internet technology. She was a feisty woman with the temper of a red-head (“That’s the Irish in me,” she would say), but she had a powerful capability for great love and affection. She looked at herself as a matriarchal protector, an iron claw standing between any perceived injustice and her family (“You mess with the bull, you get the horns.”) She was witty and hilarious, the life of any party (“And that’s when I was sober”), and often spoke in a mix of Italian swear words and hyperbolic colloquialisms (“Hells of fire!”) She was also an armchair encyclopedia of films and the lives of the stars from about 1945 to 1969, she was always handy with a recommendation for a great old movie. Her favorite film was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Her passion, though, was food and cooking. She had a collection of cookbooks that would give the library of Alexandria a run for its money. A devout Roman Catholic, Frances was fond of saying her rosary and praying for those around her. She would often tell her loved ones, “You do the running, and I’ll do the praying.” She was truly one of a kind, and she will be sorely missed. "So it goes..." Graveside Services will be held Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 11:00 am in the Riverside National Cemetery, 22495 Van Buren Boulevard, Riverside, CA.