Alan Capper, an English transplant who had a successful media career and who penned profiles of Long Island City residents for the LIC Courier, died on Wednesday. He was 75.
Capper began his career as a journalist, where he wrote for The Sunday Times and The Daily Express in London. He then created a media consulting firm, which he sold to communications and advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi in 1985. He became chairman of the firm in 1992 and moved permanently to New York in 1995.
He represented the presidents and prime ministers of countries including Romania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and served as personal media adviser to composer Andrew Lloyd Weber.
Capper became the New York correspondent for London news radio station LBC 97.3 FM and Independent Television News in January 2001. He was responsible for breaking the news of the Sept. 11 attacks on these stations just two minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
He was on the Dean’s Council of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for five years and served as an adjunct professor at New York University in 2002 where he taught culture and communications.
Capper also served as president of the Foreign Press Association from 2006 through 2013.
He moved to Long Island City in 2007 and began to write profiles of Long Island City residents for LIC Courier magazine in 2013. Capper captured the people and places that made up the fabric of Long Island City, writing about an accomplished filmmaker, scarf designer and extensively about the LIC arts scene, including a piece on the BrickHouse Ceramic Art Center.
Capper was a “pillar of the community,” according to his daughter Carolyn Nagler, and was also active as a board member of his granddaughter’s school, the New York Center for Autism charter school in Harlem.
Gildo Spado, an Astoria/Long Island City-based photographer, said he saw Capper at Gantry Plaza State Park for the first time in 2013 and immediately knew he wanted to befriend him. Spado saw him in the neighborhood again and introduced himself.
They became fast friends, he said.
“Alan was one of a kind,” Spado said. “He was one of the most interesting men I have ever met. A man’s man”
A service will be held at O’Shea-Hoey Funeral Home, located at 29-16 Ditmars Blvd., on Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 5 p.m. Friends are asked to join family after drinks at Crescent & Vine at 25-03 Ditmars Blvd. in Astoria.
