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This story was updated Thursday, Sept. 17, with reporting from Pam Foye's funeral service at Eustis & Cornell of Marblehead. Get our free local reporting delivered straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam — just clear, independent coverage of Marblehead. Sign up for our once-a-week newsletter.
Every month, the Marblehead Council on Aging's newsletter had to reach its members, and for years Pamela Joy "Pam" Foye had a system.
Joan Cutler was one of her volunteers. Cutler recalls hundreds of copies a month; what she called the "ungodly stapling or folding and sticking"; a debate over staples versus sticky tabs; and about five staplers, later electric ones.
"It was a production line," Cutler said, "and it was hilarious because you did it Pam's way."
Foye died Saturday, Sept. 12, at Kaplan Family Hospice House in Danvers, after a brief illness with metastatic cancer, according to her family's obituary. She was 83. Her funeral was held Thursday afternoon at Eustis & Cornell of Marblehead.
Her work ran through Anchor to Windward, the Marblehead Housing Authority and the Council on Aging, and Cutler knew her in all three.
Home and family on Atlantic Avenue
Foye led Anchor to Windward, a nonprofit serving local adults with mild developmental disabilities, for many years. In July 2014, it marked its 25th anniversary with a backyard cookout and homemade carnival games at its 74 Atlantic Ave. headquarters. It served 32 clients then, few enough for one-on-one support, the Marblehead Reporter noted.
"They enjoy the simple pleasure of being around each other, and we nurture that," Foye told the Reporter. "They consider this their home and family. They love interacting with each other and are very happy."
Cutler said she thought Foye first organized Anchor to Windward's Christmas fairs.
By her family's count, Foye spent 15 years on the Housing Authority's Board of Commissioners after winning election in 2009. Cutler served with her for eight of them. She recalled that members rotated the chairmanship, which Foye held off and on, and that Foye was "always very prepared, always willing to listen to people" and ran "a very fair meeting."
"She loved being on the Housing Authority," Cutler said.
At the 2014 Town Meeting, Foye sponsored a citizen article to waive about $10,000 in permitting fees the authority paid when working on its own properties.
The board also voted to bar smoking on all eight of the authority's local properties, including inside tenants' units, citing health risks, fire hazards and repair costs. Foye, the board's vice chairperson, put it plainly.
"Smoking costs everybody a lot of money," she said.
Some tenants worried about a lease provision making violations grounds for ending a tenancy.
"We're not going to be kicking anybody out. It's a last resort," she told the Reporter.
In 2011, Foye became president of the Friends of the Council on Aging and announced a launch party for a new Marblehead calendar. Three years later, after the agency's director, Teri McDonough, resigned, the Select Board chose Foye on Oct. 1, 2014, to run it on an interim basis. She had once worked its front desk as a temporary employee, and she gave up a seat on its board to take the job.
"She doesn't need a whole lot to get up to speed," then-Select Board member Judy Jacobi, the board's liaison to the agency, said at the time, adding, "We are lucky to have her."
In her "Up for Air" column that month, Reporter columnist Dawn Bucket tipped her hat to "Pam Foye, venerable director of Anchor to Windward," for stepping in "to fill big shoes" until the Select Board, whom Bucket called the Fearless Five, picked a full-time chief.
The Select Board appointed Lisa Hooper Dec. 10. The next month, they received a letter from Foye. She wanted to rejoin the Council on Aging board.
A drink at 5, then a spread
Cutler remembered invitations to Foye's house for a couple of drinks around 5 p.m. Cutler didn't drink, but she went. Foye would have "such a spread" she had cooked, and a visit could run two or three hours, "not about board stuff, just about town stuff." Cutler described her as "a great cook" and "delightful."
"She really cared about Marblehead. She truly did," Cutler said.
On New Year's Eve 2013, Foye was among Rotary Club of Marblehead Harbor volunteers who bought, cooked and served supper for people in need at Lifebridge in Salem.
Marblehead had not always been home. Foye's father was a career U.S. Army soldier, and for her first 18 years the family moved from assignment to assignment, living in New Bedford; New York City; Rhode Island; France; Texas; and Germany, according to her obituary. She settled in Marblehead in 1976.
What Cutler remembers best are Foye's stories of France. Foye loved telling them, Cutler said, including one about keeping food in a little box outside the window in cold weather because there was no refrigerator. Cutler also recalled a living room covered with "magnificent things from France and about France."
During an interview, Cutler tried to remember when she first met Foye. She couldn't.
"I miss her," Cutler said.
At Thursday's service, Monsignor Timothy J. Moran of Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish led the prayers, and Foye's daughter, Meghann E. Foye, delivered the eulogy. She told the room her mother had written her own obituary. She had run the eulogy's themes past her, she said, and her mother approved them.
"She had thoughts about this service. She had thoughts about most things actually," Meghann Foye said, "and I think anyone who knew her will understand that I say that lovingly."
She described a childhood spent in motion: three crossings of the Atlantic by ship; a French Canadian household on Shaw Street in New Bedford; Brooklyn and the Bronx; Killeen, Texas, where she picked up a twang and the nickname Tex; a rented apartment in Rochefort, France, without indoor plumbing, from ages 9 to 11; and Nuremberg, where she finished high school. At 17 she sailed home alone, landed at Grand Central Terminal in the rain with cardboard luggage and got herself onto a train to Rhode Island.
"Be brave, independent, figure it out, keep going, get yourself where you need to go," her daughter said of the lesson in that story.
'Making things run well'
In Marblehead, she made her own craft kits and tutorials for Anchor to Windward clients, ran craft fairs to raise money for the organizations she worked for and once did a stand-up routine at a Rotary fundraiser. When her daughter moved back from New York and struggled with a new puppy, Foye took over the dog's daily care.
"If there was one thing my mother loved, it was making things run well," Meghann Foye said.
Jessica Barnett, who moved across the street in 1977 with her husband, Andy, said Foye was their first friend in Marblehead and her dinner invitation their first. It was, Barnett said, French-inspired, with champagne. They knew her 49 years, through a Christmas Eve dessert tradition Foye started and the blizzard of '78.
"If you had the opportunity to serve with Pam," Barnett said, "you know she brought wisdom, insights, guidance and generosity to every discussion and every decision."
Jean-Ellen Metizier, a cousin of Foye's former husband, Daniel Foye, lived with Foye while working a practicum at Lynn Community Health Center. She said Foye had a bed made and a meal waiting after long days, and she remembered how Foye cared for Daniel when he was ill, "even though, by all accounts, she didn't have to."
Tonia Auerbach, a neighbor of almost two decades, said her daughters carried Foye's groceries and shoveled her driveway, and Foye pressed cash into their hands and told them, "Don't tell your mother." The invitation to Friday happy hours came by text: "Come over for cheap wine." The spread ranged, Auerbach said, from caviar to Totino's pizza rolls.
"She was soft-spoken, but she was formidable," Auerbach said.
Moran, who said he had only just learned Foye's middle name, built his reflection on two French phrases: la joie de vivre, and savoir faire, knowing how things are done. Afterward, mourners were invited to Le Comptoir to raise a glass.
Her daughter closed the eulogy with a guess about what her mother is doing now.
"I'm pretty sure she has a whole new menu to start organizing," she said.
Foye was born Aug. 2, 1943, in Acushnet, the only child of Arthur A. and Violette R. (Desrosiers) Diggett. She is survived by her daughter, Meghann E. Foye of Marblehead. Visiting hours are Thursday, Sept. 17, beginning at 3 p.m., followed by a funeral service at 4 p.m. at Eustis & Cornell of Marblehead, 142 Elm St. Memorial donations may be made to Anchor to Windward or the Marblehead Female Humane Society.
