Bio: Foster, Gary (Footlocker’s Secrets – 2018)

Contact: Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon
E-mail: dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org 

Surnames: Foster

----Source: Clark County Press (Neillsville, Clark Co., WI) 3/28/2018

Foster, Gary (Footlocker’s Secrets – 2018)

Footlocker’s Secrets Shared in Book About Former Neillsville Mayor



Gary Foster, a retired U. S. Navy aviator originally from Neillsville, used notes and other items he found in his grandfather’s World War I footlocker to write “Notes from the Trenches: A Musician’s Journey Through World War I.” Foster’s grandfather was Leo Foster, who during the early 1950’s served as Neillsville’s mayor. The author lives in Arizona, where he works as an aviation analyst for the Federal Aviation Administration. (Contributed photo)

By Scott Schultz

Music jumped from Leo Foster’s footlocker when it was opened by his grandson Gary Foster. That music was in the letters, notes, clippings and keepsakes Leo kept in the footlocker – itself a keepsake from the Leo’s service in World War I.

Gary pored through the footlocker and developed its contents into a book, “Notes from the Trenches – A Musician’s Journey through World War I.” It takes Leo’s travels from the times of being a youthful musician with his family’s band, through World War I battles 1917-19, and through his post-war life with his wife Mary and his time as Neillsville’s mayor.

The book was released in January.

“I got the footlocker when my parents moved out of their house,” Gary said. “I was busy with my career, so I really didn’t get through it for a while.”

That all changed when Gary, then a U. S. Navy flight officer, retired and started to really dig into the footlocker’s contents in 2010.

The footlocker deepened the knowledge Gary had about his family, and then some. Putting it all together in a book was his means of preserving and sharing it, along with using it as a reminder of War’s horrors.

Above all, Gary said, he didn’t want his family’s history to be filled with gaps.

“It uncovered a lot,” Gary said. “When my dad (longtime Neillsville optometrist John Foster) died in 2016, he took every ounce of family information with him,” Gary said.

The family’s first touch with Neillsville was in 1880, when Leo’s father started working at a brewery and then ran Farmers Hotel, which Gary said was on the property where the Clark County Courthouse sits.

Leo’s family then moved to La Crosse. His father died when he was a small child; Leo and his three sisters were raised primarily by his mother, who was a nurse.

Gary said it was clear that the family was musically inclined. Leo and his sisters traveled the area as the Foster Orchestra; they also performed as stage actors.

Leo’s family, German immigrants, was “a little bit irritated” about the start of World War I, according to Gary. Leo took action, joining the Wisconsin National Guard. He trained with the 32nd “Red Arrow” Division in Camp Douglas and Texas before being sent to France.

Leo wrote letters to his family about four times each week during his time overseas.

Gary said Leo’s musical skills were handy during Leo’s service years: his job included serving as a bugler.

The letters present a mix of Leo’s apparent attempts of humor to lighten his family’s fears while still expressing the war’s ugly realities.

“Say, what do you want to worry so much for, this ain’t a bad war,” Leo wrote in one of the letters in July of 1918. “Look at all the experience you get out of all of this. ‘Course, a little iron falling around once in a while is just about right to give us a little amusement.”

He described being hit in the forehead by a round ricocheting in the trenches of France.

Leo was affected by shell-shock during fighting in Roncheres, France, and then was seriously wounded during the Second Battle of Marne when an explosion pitted shrapnel into his head, legs and abdomen.

A medic marked Leo as being dead, and his mother received a War Department telegram stating that. She later received another telegram – from the Red Cross – informing her that Leo was being treated in an army hospital.

As he recovered, a plate in his head to cover a wound, Leo itched to rejoin his battle-hardened comrades in the field.

He returned to the battlefields in September of 1918, where he again was wounded.

An armistice ended the fighting on Nov. 11, 1918. Leo and his Red Arrow Division comrades returned to Wisconsin heroes’ welcome in April of 1919.

Gary included in the book the highs and lows he learned about Leo’s postwar life. Among the highs was his marriage to Martha, who was one of the first women to be licensed as an optometrist in Wisconsin.

Leo and Martha made their ways to Black River Falls, her opening optometric practices in Neillsville and Black River Falls. Foster Primary Eye Care continues in its third generation, having been operated by Gary’s father and now by his brother Gregory.

The Fosters moved to Neillsville in 1936, and in 1950 Leo became Neillsville’s mayor for three years.

Along the way, Leo occasionally told parts of his story to others. But until Gary’s book unlocked it, much of the stories remained in Leo’s footlocker.

The book goes beyond chronicling the war, instead delving into Leo’s deepest thoughts as described through his letters and the footlocker’s other contents.

“This book is a tribute to the men like my grandfather who fought as Doughboys in the First World War,” Gary wrote in the book’s prologue. “…The men are all gone now, but as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the armistice in 1918, we need to remember the selfless sacrifice they made. A heavy price was paid in the war to end all wars. My grandfather was in the thick of this war. He blew his bugle commands as a patriot, and he paid a heavy price – one that he recounts in his notes from the trenches.”

Notes from the Trenches: A Musicians Journey Through World War I, is available through Amazon and barnesandnoble.com.
 

 

 


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