Marguerite Foy

(as told by Elizabeth Perkins Buchheit)

My mother Marguerite was just a very sweet, kind soul. She was an only child. Her father, WILLIAM JOHN FOY, was from Ireland. In that place, I think they’d sell their grandmother to get educated, they were so mad about education. Just wild about it. My mother graduated from St. Xavier’s College in Chicago which today has 4,000 students.

My mother said she always remembered that my dad had this horse called Moses. Moses was a white Arabian horse and he was beautiful. He used to lead the parades. My mother was very impressed by that horse.

In those days women did not have jobs but not because they couldn’t do it. Women were not allowed to have jobs because you couldn’t have more than one breadwinner in the family and you hoped he got the bread because there was so much unemployment. It was really tragic because there were some women who were widows. It was very difficult to get a job if you were a woman.

Like my father, my mother was very active in municipal affairs. She belonged to a lot of organizations and was very active in the Episcopal Church. My mother and father sang in the choir and all of those kinds of things. They were also head of the Red Cross in Illinois. They were very forward-looking. They taught me to be tolerant of all people.