Bob Flaherty
Foley and his Franks
Tragedy and a New Beginning for the Guy with the Smile
NORTHAMPTON
For 17 years the hot dog guy, Mike Foley, has held down this spot, out at the truck turn-around on Route 5, at the southernmost edge of town. His lunch-on-the-run customers skid into the lot one after the other, grabbing dogs, burgers, chili, tuna melts, the whole works.
But the friendly guy with the inviting banter of a bartender, may be winding down. The grind is getting to him and he has grandchildren in North Carolina.
“I like people,” he said, “but when I was in sales and wore a tie, I didn’t bring the job home. Here, I get home and I’ve got three hours ahead of me, making chili and stuff.”
The Holyoke native from South Hadley has also been severely scarred by the opioids epidemic. Mike Foley’s son Sean died of an overdose July 7 of last year.
“He would have been 35. My grandson, his baby, he never got to meet, died before he was born. Little Sean came on my son’s birthday, December 14, a happy and sad occasion.” Foley takes out a picture. “He’s walking already, soon to be a year old.”
Also in his wallet is a drawing by his teenage granddaughter.
So things are in flux. His aim is to sell the house and buy something smaller or take his ex-wife—who he calls “the best ex anyone could have”—up on her offer to move in with her and her boyfriend in NC. “I’ll be staying at her house three weeks, see what’s going on. It’s ideal, a ranch, with bedrooms at each end with bathrooms.”
But for the next six months or so, aside from the vacation south, Foley will be out here, cooking dogs, with a smile to heal all pain.
Birth of an Enterprise
After graduating Holyoke High, Foley took classes at HCC and earned a degree in business administration from Western New England College.
He tended bar, naturally, at The Buccaneer in Agawam, sold replacement windows, then printing products for 21 years before the company went belly up. “I was 51 years old. That type of sales was a dying breed with the internet and everything. So I had a stupid idea: I’ll get a hot dog cart. I had the little one you stand next to.”
His easy way with people led to some modest money-making and the Ace, King and Queen of spades took it from there.
He had wanted the kind of rig that you can haul with your car, the “horse with no name,” he calls it.
“Between the trailer, the commercial refrigerator, the grill and everything else, you need 25 grand to get going,” he said. “I went down to Mohegan Sun and won $23,000 playing three card poker, which pretty much paid for the whole thing.”
He went looking for a nice open spot with lots of traffic and ZOOOOM did he find it. “Yeah, they’d see the umbrella, yellow and red, so they knew I was selling hot dogs. All I knew was that I could pay my mortgage.”
He orders meat a hundred pounds at a time, stores everything in the kitchen of his best friend’s restaurant, his base of operations in Holyoke. “A lot of people who get into this business don’t realize they gotta have a licensed kitchen.”
Foley’s stand is a year-round operation. He gets plowed out by the same buddy who stores his food.
Speak of the devil, in swerves the proprietor of Pic’s Pub and Pizzeria, one Pickles Delude of Holyoke.
“I owe you fifty bucks,” he says, forking Foley the cash.
“I owe you $150,” counters Foley, reaching in the drawer.
“What? You owe me? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the card game.”
Informed that the columnist is interviewing his lifelong pal for the paper, Pickles laughed, “You must be desperate.”
“Yeah, he’s done all the good people, now he wants to come down to the swamps,” laughed Foley.
“He was a pitcher,” said Delude. “Lefthanded. Helluva fastball, but didn’t know how to throw a hook,” he laughed.
“Had to ride my bike to practice, way out to Springfield Park,” said Foley. “Lots of riots back then. When I was in centerfield I’d pray ‘Please don’t hit the ball to me—I’ll have to run between the riots, dodging knives.’”
Meanwhile, his steady stream of motorized clientele does not slow till mid-afternoon. Burning question: how many dogs does a hot dog guy down? “One or two a week maybe,” laughed Mike Foley. “I watch what I eat. It’s easy to eat five or six a day, believe me.”
A few Northampton cops are regulars. “I always say ‘I got a license to carry, so if you have any trouble I’ll help you out,’” Foley laughed.
“He’s gotta,” said Pickles. “He’s in a cash business and there’s the interstate—easy on, easy off.”
The Knock at the Door
“Sean had been clean for three years, then OD’d three times in my house,” said Foley. “Tried to kill himself. I heard a noise and got out of bed. He’s lying on the floor with a rope around his neck. Fortunately, he didn’t have a good secure knot and he fell. I said, “Sean, you want to kill yourself in my kitchen, make me live with that the rest of my life?”
Like many parents who’ve lived through this scourge, Foley knows what it’s like to have your child steal money right out of your wallet. “He stole twenty grand worth of jewelry from his mom. And they’d been doing so well together. She misses him terribly.”
“Totalled like four cars. He was clean 90 percent of the time, but that ten percent … it was just awful.”
When he could keep a job, he was great. “He was fantastic at sales, sold modular homes in North Carolina. Then they did a CORI report on him. He was in the process of getting all that stuff off his record, and then came July 7.”
“I had my phone off, heard a knock at the door and my brother-in-law’s there and the first words out of his mouth: ‘Sean’s dead.’ He didn’t say ‘passed away’ or anything, just ‘Sean’s dead.’ Thanks, Dave, then I paced my house for like two hours.”
The first week of July has become a bitter one for Foley. The food trailer stayed in his driveway this year.
“I was always hoping when he had that baby, a child of his own, that would’ve turned him around. My daughter-in-law had three kids of her own. He had such responsibility—he was a soccer coach and everything.”
He’s also familiar with the great paradox of a kid taking one prescription to quell the opioid cravings while freeing himself up to use other wild-assed non-opioid street drugs, an oft-told tale.
“A couple of times I had him come sleep with me in bed, just to keep an eye on him, keep him safe.”
Amid a life of bad decision-making, Sean Foley’s humanity often shone through.
“He broke into a house in Connecticut, and the dog got out. And he’s running around the yard trying to get the dog back in the house and he got busted. They asked if I wanted to post bail. I said keep him there, he’s safe.”
“It’s an awful disease and anybody who says it’s not, knows nothing about it. No kid starts out wanting to be a drug addict; some people can do it and never do it again. Sean, the minute he took it, he was hooked.”
Foley fights back tears as he thinks of his son and his dashed potential. “You’re helpless, there’s nothing you can do. And the amount of fentanyl coming into this country—we gotta close that border.”
He looks out at the view he’s contemplated for 17 years. He has several people lining up to buy the operation but has yet to make anything official.
“It’s a tough business, but if you can make it through the first three years you’ll be in good shape. But you gotta have good food, and a great personality, right, Pic?”
“He still tends bar at my place,” said Pickles. “Everybody loves him.”
Bob Flaherty 