Students who come to Ferris from the Upper Peninsula might think the lengthy car ride to Big Rapids is a hardship. But what if there was no Mackinac Bridge, no expressways lined with their ubiquitous fast food drive-through windows?
   What if they had to cross the straits in a coal-fired steamer and drive bumpy gravel roads through a part of the state that had lost much of its population due to a decline in the timber trade?
   That’s the route Frances Capucille (B’19) took to study at what was then the Ferris Institute.
   Born in 1899 and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., Capucille worked for the Hudson Motor Car Company, sang for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and knew Woodbridge Ferris as one of the school’s instructors.
   Capucille’s Italian-American father owned a neighborhood grocery store not far from where she still lives today.
  “My dad had a store on Minneapolis Street,” Capucille recalls. “He sold apples and corn, small stuff. He gave help to people around the neighborhood.”
   Her father didn’t want her to travel too far from home for her education, so she enrolled at the Ferris Institute and studied shorthand, bookkeeping and typing. She stayed in a local boarding house, concentrated on her studies and pursued an early interest in music by singing with the Ferris Orchestra.
   In 1918-19, Woodbridge Ferris was teaching at the Institute between having served two terms as Michigan’s governor and being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1922. Capucille recalls the University founder simply as “a nice guy.”
   Upon graduation, Capucille took her office training and got a job with the Hudson Motor Car Company showroom in Pontiac – a job she worked at for nine years. When the dealership went under, she became employed by Oakland County where she worked for the next 37 years before retiring.
   During that time, FDR made campaign appearances throughout metro Detroit in October of 1936, closing out his swing with a visit to Pontiac. Capucille remembers singing for the United States only four-term president whose physical disability was at that time largely kept hidden from the public.
   “Roosevelt didn’t get off the train. Eleanor got off the caboose and walked around,” says Capucille. “ She shook hands with me.” Capucille, who often sang at weddings, performed “America” for the man about to be elected to a second term in office over Alf Landon.
   After her retirement from Oakland County, Capucille lived in Pontiac for a number of years before returning to her native Sault Ste. Marie, moving back into the house she was born in, which has been in the family since Capucille’s parents bought it in the 1890s.
   Capucille traveled to Europe during her retirement and has stayed active in the community, singing in a local church choir until suffering a mild stroke shortly before her birthday last July.
   In her 105th year, Capucille continues to enjoy her heritage through a love of Italian food, and her passion for music by attending concerts, such as a recent visit to ‘The Soo’ by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
   She also still has a remarkably firm grip when she shakes hands, just as she did when Eleanor Roosevelt greeted her nearly 70 years ago.