The Foys

(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)

[William John Foy, Marguerite Foy and Friends]

My grandfather, William John Foy, came from Ireland to New York. Lake Champlain is where his family settled. His father, Poppa Foy, had a rather strange demise. He went to Canada on a business trip but when he arrived at the hotel and asked the man at the front desk for a room, the man said, “I don’t have any rooms except one that no one will stay in because it’s haunted.” Poppa Foy said, “Okay, I’ll take it.” Well, in the middle of the night, Poppa Foy woke up and found a ghost standing at the foot of his bed! The ghost booed, “I’ve been maligned for a crime I didn’t commit!” That scared the daylights out of Poppa Foy. His hair turned completely white! He returned home and died three days later of a heart attack.

Poppa Foy left behind two boys — William and his brother. Their family was very, very poor so their mother did whatever Irish mothers did like wash clothes and take in boarders. One day a peddler came to town. That was very exciting for country kids who didn’t have a lot of exposure to new people. William asked his mother if he could ride along with the peddler for the day and his mother agreed. So William spent a whole day traveling all around the countryside with this peddler and had the best time. When he got back home, he said to his mother, “Well, I’ve returned and I see nothing’s changed. Why, you even have the same cat!”

When William was about 12 and his brother was about 14, their mother sent them to live with her brother in Chicago. There, they worked in a horseshoe nail factory.

William eventually got into the hotel business. He bought, ran and sold hotels. His family moved a lot because of that. He ran one of the hotels in Watertown, Wisconsin which is still in business to this day