On June 6, my grandpa, Bill Foley, would have turned 100 years old.
A World War II veteran, Grandpa Bill passed away at the age of 89 on Feb. 12, 2015. As I searched for a photo to mark his birthday, I came across the eulogy I wrote for him in the days after his death.
So, in honor of 100th, I thought I would share this with you so you might be able to see why I still think and talk about Grandpa Bill every day more than a decade after he passed. I read this at his funeral at St. Patrick’s Church on Feb. 20, 2015:
Whenever you saw Grandpa Bill, the first thing you would notice was his smile. It was a smile that suggested he was about to tell you something funny or, more likely, that he was up to something. He spent all of his life — 89 years, 8 months and 6 days — up to something.
Whether it was messing with the perfect shine on his buddy Bob Barger’s cowboy boots or going along with one of the gags him and his pal Norm Snell cooked up at the golf course, Grandpa always had a trick up his sleeve.
The best part was hearing him tell the story after the fact.
He told us so many unforgettable stories. Most of his tails involved the golf course, the Plaza Pub, the Top Deck, getting in trouble with his brother George or, of course, the Navy. Some of the best ones took place right here in this neighborhood when he was growing up on Silver Street.
Probably my favorite of Grandpa’s stories was when he told about the time he brought a gun to school. Well, technically, he brought a gun to school. It wasn’t a functional gun, however.
He was 9 or 10 and it was 1934 or 35 when he and a friend found the gun on the ground on their way to the Saint Patrick’s Elementary School. The barrel of the gun was rusted out, and it was missing the cylinder. So even if he wanted to, he couldn’t shoot it.
That, however, didn’t stop him from having a little fun. He took it to one of his classmates, pulled the gun out like he was Billy the Kid and said, “Stick ’em up.”
Not being let in on the secret that the gun was a dud, the classmate ran and told on Grandpa.
So, Grandpa hid the gun under a rock and went to school. After school, the nuns weren’t about to let him go home. He was held in a classroom for interrogation.
“Mr. Foley, you are not leaving here until you produce that gun.”
Like all good cops, the nuns took a break from the interrogation and left him alone in the classroom. That’s when he went to the window, flagged down a different classmate and had him fetch the gun. He put the gun in his desk until the nuns came back.
“OK, are you going to tell us where the gun is?” one asked. With that, Grandpa pulled out the gun and went to hand it over to the nuns, who acted exactly how you would expect a group of nuns to act when a gun was pointed at them.
Grandpa would laugh as he described them dancing around and ducking for cover.
Another classic school story came a few years later when grandpa was at Butte Central and he smacked his teacher, who was a Catholic brother.
In this case, surprisingly, he didn’t even start the fight.
Toward the end of the day, the brother had his back turned to the class when the guy behind grandpa threw what was basically a giant spit wad at the blackboard.
The object was big enough that it rattled the blackboard and startled the brother, who quickly went down his list of usual suspects and identified Grandpa. He immediately approached Grandpa and slapped him several times across the face.
Grandpa, who for some reason happened to be holding a big eraser, winded up and blasted the brother across the face with it. The shot knocked the brother off balance reversed the part on his hair.
Then, as fate would have it, the bell rang, and Grandpa was literally saved by the bell. As the students filed out the class, the brother told everybody to go home and “Say a prayer for Bill Foley.”
“Nobody,” Grandpa said, “prayed harder than Bill Foley.”
The prayers must have paid off because Grandpa never got in trouble the next day. Somehow, the brother learned that, this one time anyway, Bill Foley was wrongfully accused.
Then there were Grandpa’s Navy stories. He left high school early to fight for our country in World War II. He served through five major battles in the Pacific Theater, but he never talked a whole lot about those.
Instead, he preferred to talk about the time he jumped off the deck of the USS Rudyerd Bay to retrieve a basketball, the time all the sailors were given a brush to scrub the deck on Christmas Day or the time he unknowingly made Joe DiMaggio take off his shoes at a base in San Diego.
I didn’t get a true sense of the terror it must have been to be at war until I read his diary the other night.
On Dec. 18, 1944 he wrote about a typhoon that sunk three destroyers and killed 800 men. He told about the 100-knot winds and the 50-foot waves. He talked about the bodies in the water.
On Feb. 21, 1945 he wrote about how 27 Kamikazes attacked his unit.
Then, when I flipped the page to September, I learned that the 27th is his sister Shirley’s birthday. I also saw that June 20is his brother Don’s birthday, and Dec. 30 is George’s birthday.
The mentions of Shirley, Don and George, though, really spoke to what Grandpa was all about. There he was, a young man who had to be frightened out of his mind, and his thoughts were still with his family.
He wasn’t the best at saying it, but family meant so much to Grandpa. Once in a while, when the Lucky Lager became truth serum as I was his designated driver on the way home from the golf course, I’d get a peek into his feelings.
One night he told me that he hopes that he dies before Grandma Jean. He told me he could never live without her. In the end, I truly believe he hung on few more years after most men would have passed so he could try to take care of Grandma Jean, who really was the love of his life.
Other rides home revealed how much Grandpa truly loved my dad and his sister.
Grandpa was also very proud of his four grandsons.
Whether it was Donny speed skating or golfing, me writing stories in the paper, Zach playing football for Butte Central and then Montana Tech or Bobby smarting off to an authority figure, Grandpa Bill always took so much satisfaction out of everything we did.
On one ride home from the golf course, Grandpa told me that he wanted to live long enough to see the four of us as grown men.
Well, he did that. He got to meet all four of our wives and refer to them all as “biscuits,” a term they knew by his smile was an endearing one. He lived long enough to welcome 11 great-grandchildren into the world.
Grandpa Bill was part of what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.” He literally helped save the world while serving on the Rudyerd Bay.
The last four or five years were really hard on Grandpa. He broke his left hip and had his right leg amputated above the knee in the same week in 2011.
His memory wasn’t quite the same, and he was in a great deal of pain, often grimacing while reaching for an aching leg that was no longer there. Still, he rarely complained.
Every time you’d see him he would still have that smile suggesting he was up to something. Like always, he usually was. Until the end, he was still Grandpa Bill.
So today we say goodbye to a man who we love so much. While it is comforting to know that he is no longer in pain, it is still very hard to say so long.
It is hard to image that he will not be retelling those stories one more time.
Rest in peace, Grandpa. You have certainly earned it.
— Bill Foley, who always idolized his Grandpa Bill, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
The ButteCast with Bill Foley 