Article by Gwen Jones, Department of Family Services
(Posted 2025 January)
Cap Oliver has been guided by his Christian faith since he was a boy. After becoming a doctor, he chose to pursue missionary work overseas. He served in Nigeria for 10 years, treating thousands of patients with leprosy. After returning to the United States, he became deeply involved in his church, reading and discussing scripture with fellow congregants. He also founded a medical practice where he and his partners sought to establish meaningful relationships with their patients. Now, at age 97, Cap credits his faith for his long and productive life.
Cap Hill Oliver, Jr. was born in Ranger, TX on Valentines Day in 1927, the only child of Cap Hill and Annie May Oliver. While it is easy to assume that Cap is a nickname, it is the given name of both father and son. Cap’s father was named after his uncle, Captain Hill, who had served in the Civil war. After returning to Texas following the war, he became known as Cap Hill. He was such a favorite uncle that Cap Hill Oliver’s three older sisters convinced their parents to name their new baby brother after him.
During Cap’s childhood, the Oliver family moved from place to place in central west Texas because of his father’s job with a pipeline company. Young Cap’s childhood friends were the boys who worked in the pipeline camp, and they spent nearly all their time outdoors – swimming, fishing and hunting. Cap’s mother came from a large religious family, so she made sure her only son attended church and Sunday school every week. She also read Bible stories to him at home.
When Cap was in the eighth grade, he and his mother moved to a farm near Fort Worth so he could get a better education. They attended church and Sunday school at a small Presbyterian church in Handley, TX. Every Sunday, a couple taught Bible verses to the congregation. On one Sunday in 1941, the couple shared that their only son, who recently joined the military, had been killed in a head-on collision two days earlier. The husband said that he didn’t know why his son was taken, but his faith was unshaken. He shared his favorite verse with the congregation – Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” This event left a deep impression on Cap and reaffirmed his own faith.
During Cap’s senior year of high school, his father was transferred to De Leon, TX. Originally, Cap was planning to stay with his best friend to finish high school. However, his parents wanted the family to stay together with World War II still raging. In March 1944, the armed services came to his high school to administer exams to the boys. Cap took the test and forgot all about it until May, when a letter and train ticket arrived in the mail informing him that he had been accepted into the Navy’s V12 program. The V12 program was created in 1942 to increase the number of commissioned naval officers during WWII. Students were put on different career paths to backfill key roles. In Cap’s case, he was put on a path to study medicine and become a doctor.
After graduating high school, Cap traveled to Austin, TX to attend the V12 program at the University of Texas. He and eight other high school graduates were joined by 20 service members who had been selected for the program. “They had been fighting the war and were really tired. Most of them took it as a R&R. They didn’t study; they were just glad to be out of the war,” Cap recalls. Only one of the service members completed the program along with the nine high school students, but by that time in 1945, the war had ended.
While attending the V12 program, Cap met a young woman named Helene, who was a fellow member of the Presbyterian student league. He was so smitten with her that he attended an extra year at the University of Texas, taking electives so he could spend time with her. Helene was from Vienna, VA, and originally majored in anthropology before switching to education to become a teacher. Although Cap hadn’t considered pursuing a career in medicine prior to the V12 program, he continued his studies, attending medical school at the University of Texas, Galveston from 1947 to 1951, graduating in the top three of his class. Helene moved to Galveston to teach, and the couple married in August 1948.
After Cap graduated from medical school, the U.S. Government came calling, reminding him that he had agreed to work in the public health services for three years in exchange for his education. For his first year, he completed an internship in Baltimore at the Marine Hospital. During year two, he worked at an outpatient clinic in Washington, D.C., treating government employees who were injured on the job.
Before year two was complete, he and Helene discussed their shared interest in pursuing missionary work. With an eye toward serving in a mission overseas, for his third year of public health service, Cap asked to be assigned to the National Leprosarium in Carville, LA, the only hospital in the United States that treated leprosy. While working in Carville, Cap was able to observe surgeries on hands and feet to fix deformities caused by leprosy. A breakthrough in the treatment of leprosy had recently been discovered, a medicine that was kin to sulfone drugs, so Cap was well prepared to treat leprosy patients anywhere his missionary work took him.
In the fall of 1954, Cap and Helene applied to a mission through the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM). They were accepted and departed in the spring of 1955. The Olivers were sent to Nigeria to work at a leprosarium in the northern part of the country. The mission had five leprosariums in total – two in the south and three in the north – with only three doctors among all five, treating thousands of patients. According to Cap, once doctors were able to establish the proper dose, most leprosy patients responded well to the medicine. Milder cases were cured in a few years while more severe cases took seven or eight years.
While Cap was treating patients, Helene led the school at the leprosarium. She also maintained the records at the medical clinic they established to treat the local population for other ailments, such as fever or malaria. The missions also created seminaries and a teacher training school so that once a member of the community was trained and could perform a job, they would take over from the missionary that was doing the job.
After four years of service, the Olivers returned to the United States for a year. While serving in Nigeria, they asked SIM if they could adopt a Nigerian child but were told it wasn’t allowed. Upon returning to the U.S., the couple made arrangements to adopt U.S. children. Their son, Stephen, was born in Chicago and adopted by the couple when he was three months old. Their daughter, Anne, was born in Texas and had been born very premature, weighing just over two pounds. When she reached five pounds, she was released from the hospital to go home with the Olivers.
After spending a year in the U.S., the Oliver family returned to Nigeria. This time they were stationed in the city of Kano in northern Nigeria. Cap worked at the leprosarium in Kano but often traveled to locations that didn’t have a doctor, including leprosariums in Niger. In addition to treating patients, Cap trained young men to be leprosy attendants, which required learning how to diagnose and treat patients. Others were trained to be lab attendants, who learned how to diagnose all manner of tropical disease in a lab. Cap formed close friendships with some of his coworkers, spending time together outside of work. “I brought a small telescope back on my second time, so we would get together at night to look at Saturn’s rings and other things,” he says.
In 1964, the family returned to the United States permanently and settled in Vienna, VA. Cap went back to medical school at George Washington University because he had forgotten a lot of American medicine during his years overseas. He did a residency in internal medicine, a fellowship in rheumatology, and eventually set up a private medical practice with two other colleagues in Arlington in 1970. “All three of us were kind of old fashioned. We didn’t rush patients. We saw them even on return visits for 30 minutes. It suited our practice, and I had very good relationships with the patients,” Cap recalls. Helene initially returned to teaching but eventually changed professions, becoming a real estate agent – a job she greatly enjoyed.
The family attended Vienna Presbyterian Church and became very involved. Cap joined a men’s group that met every Saturday morning to read and discuss scripture, and eventually became leader of the group. As the church grew, he sat on nine nominating committees to hire new ministers over the years. In 1972, Cap returned to Africa and spent a month working at a hospital at a mission station in Dahomey, West Africa. Dahomey was later renamed Benin.
Cap retired at age 70. He and Helene spent time traveling to places such as Israel and Greece with a group from church on tours arranged by ministers. By this time, their son Stephen was living in Philadelphia, teaching and doing consulting work, while Anne was married with two children, and lived in Northern Virginia.
After learning that a mole on her back was malignant, Helene underwent surgery to have it removed, along with her lymph nodes, so they thought she would be fine. However, a few years later they discovered that the cancer had metastasized to her brain. Following the diagnosis, Helene lived for six months, passing away in September 2009.
Cap continued to live in the couple’s home in Vienna. During a visit from Stephen in 2010, Cap became very sick and went to the hospital. His doctor thought he had experienced a heart attack, so he installed a stent and sent Cap home. Two days later, both Cap and Stephen became ill and were admitted to the hospital. A fire department investigation revealed that a furnace pipe had rusted through and was venting carbon monoxide into the home, making them seriously ill. However, during Cap’s return trip to the hospital, doctors discovered a large cancerous growth on his right kidney and removed it. Rather than being upset by the ordeal, Cap was grateful for the experience, saying, “If I hadn’t gone to the hospital, they never would have discovered my cancer, so it basically saved my life.”
After Helene’s death, Cap joined a widow and widowers’ group at church run by a woman named Gladys Millington. The group met once a month to socialize and go out to lunch together. Over time, Cap and Gladys became close and got married in 2012. Gladys sold her house and moved into Cap’s home. They lived there for a year while working to downsize their belongings. In December 2013, they sold the house and moved into a condo in a 55+ community in Vienna.
The pair quickly cultivated a nice group of friends in their new community. The group meets every Wednesday morning for coffee and enjoys getting together each Friday for happy hour and appetizers, celebrating birthdays one Friday each month. They also meet up regularly with friends to play bridge. The pair remain very active with their church. Cap still attends his Saturday morning discussion group each week as well as a new group that meets each Monday.
Looking back, Cap sees his Christian faith as the guiding force in his life, helping him navigate both the good and bad times. “I’m basically very optimistic. This doesn’t mean that Christians don’t go through troubles – they do. But they have much to look forward to. Troubles just increase your faith and patience and do things that are actually good for you if you go through them with perseverance,” he says.
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