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Joe Foy
When you reach my age (70) you pause occasionally to remember all the folks that help you along the way. And you perhaps check out the obits more often. Today two old friends of mine are in the Houston Chronicle’s obituaries. Tom Bullock and Joe Foy. Two great leaders in Houston’s civil and business history.
I owe a lot to Joe Foy. He along with Fred Hofheinz helped guide me in my employment for the past 30 some years. Hofheinz was Mayor of Houston from 1974 to 1978 and I served as his Executive Assistant in the Mayor’s office for two years, 1974-1976. It was a great time to be in Houston and Fred Hofheinz did much to reform City Hall. And while I served in the Mayor’s office I met Joe Foy and Tom Bullock. Foy was the President of Houston Natural Gas and Bullock was President of CRS, an architectural firm. After two years I was ready to leave the Mayor’s office, as I had served as the lighten rod for the Mayor and some folks thought I had caught enough bolts and it was time to leave. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I wrote Foy and Bullock asking for advice (and a job if possible) Each answered my letter and Foy invited me to have lunch with him. And that was the start of my career as a lobbyist and political consultant. .
Joe Foy hired me as his Assistant for Public Affairs and soon sent me to represent Houston Natural Gas with the Texas Legislature in Austin. The issue that year was coal slurry pipelines. It was a major battle with the railroads on laying a pipeline from Colorado to ship coal to Texas. We won, but to this day no coal slurry pipeline was been built. Then Foy sent me to Washington DC to lobby for a national energy plan which would allow Texas Intrastate natural gas to be shipped out of Texas but without federal control. We won and so for the next twenty years I represented Houston Natural Gas, which became InterNorth, which became Enron Corp. Foy stayed as President until 1985 and left to join the law firm of Bracewell Patterson (now Bracewell & Giuliani). He served on the Board of the various companies until the demise of Enron in 2001. I often thought that if Joe Foy had stayed on as President Enron would still be functioning today. He had taught Sunday school and would not have put up with the fancy accounting that eventually brought down the company.
Joe Foy knew politics and enjoyed politicians. He was a great civic leader and a very good lobbyist. His legal mind was very interesting to watch and he could take complex legal ideas and make them easy to understand. He had a lot to do assuring that the nation had sufficient natural gas over the next twenty years and that industry owes him a lot.
And Joe liked good wine and introduced me to wine that was not from Boones Farm.
Joe and his wife Martha moved to Kerrville in the 1990’s and the last time I saw him was at a funeral for another old friend Scarcy Bracewell. I will miss Tom and Joe and wonder what Houston would be like it they had not headed for the big city.
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