Singer, showman Billy Foster recalled as ‘clown of the class’
According to one of his oldest friends, as a child Billy Foster was the “clown of the class.”
He was “always a laugh,” Billy Frenz said. “And occasionally he’d be the first one to get thrown out of class and go to the principal’s office.”
“He was able to tell a joke that would captivate you,” he said.
When asked if his brother had always been so gregarious, so funny, Preston Foster laughed.
“I think it started with him being a breech birth. I think he came into the world ass-first and said, ‘Hey, I like that,’” Preston Foster said. “If you were a stranger he treated you like a friend. And if you were a friend he treated you like family.”
Billy Foster was known as the lead singer for the band Billy and the Showmen, a regionally popular soul cover band in Fairfield County. He started with the band in middle school and, except for a 10-year hiatus, kept going with them for 60 years, until his death last month.
“As teenagers in Armstrong Court, the housing development, there was a recreation room, and that band, Billy and the Showmen, as teenagers would come and rehearse there,” Preston Foster said.
Frenz started the band at the age of 13 as a student at Western Junior High School.
“My dad was traveling around the town, there was a summer fair and he saw that Billy and the Showmen were playing and he went by to listen to them and thought, ‘My son should sing that song,” Preston Foster said. “My dad grabbed my brother Billy, brought him in and somehow, through some quick negotiation, my brother Billy got up on stage and sang the first song.”
That song was “Twist and Shout.” “That was the first song he sang,” Preston Foster said. “Billy Frenz asked my brother to join and the rest is history.”
Preston Foster said the family never had much money, but did not really know they were among the less wealthy families in Greenwich.
“Residents of Armstrong Court were all there because they were poor, it was finances. The deal was, the rent was 30 percent of your take-home pay,” he said. “Growing up in Greenwich, because we had this little ecosystem in Armstrong Court, I didn’t really know about the wealth of Greenwich until I was about 13or 14-years-old.”
Frenz said he and Billy Foster started as bandmates, but they became friends for life.
“Back in the day, we were going to Port Chester to drink and I wasn’t 18 but he was so I would use his proof, and back then the proof was a draft card. It didn’t have your picture on it. Billy’s a Black kid and here I am a little white kid, so I’m using his proof,” Frenz said. “All they’d do is ask the date of birth, so I had to nail down ‘Feb. 9, 1948.’”
They’d go to Port Chester, Frenz said, because the drinking age was 21 in Connecticut, but only 18 in New York.
“We had some good fun, go by the beer store, drive around in the back of a buddy’s car, everyone’s with a bottle of Colt 45. Everyone got a quart of Colt 45 and four hours later, we’re all puking our brains out in the park down the street,” Frenz said.
The band grew and changed over the years, but Billy Foster was an integral part of the group until his death Jan. 26 at age 75. There was only one extended hiatus, when Frenz went off to college and Foster joined the U.S. Airforce.
“We got back together again at the Greenwich High School class reunion in ‘78,” Frenz said. “The last show we did together was, we did a Halloween party at Knights of Columbus in Greenwich.”
In the Airforce, Foster served in Vietnam as an airplane crash rescue firefighter. It was, according to his wife, Irene Foster, one of his defining characteristics.
“The way I define Billy is, he was three main things. One is family and friends. One is the music. And the third one is a veteran and the fact that he was in Vietnam and fought for the country,” she said.
Billy Foster was 18 years his wife’s senior when they met. “He introduced himself to me with a lie. And I’m not one for lies,” she said.
Austrian by birth, Irene Foster came to Stamford for work after falling in love with the United States while a tourist. She had hoped to be on the West Coast, but was transferred east from San Francisco.
“I met him in a bar,” she said. “He comes up to me and says, ‘Oh, I remember you from last week. And you look trustworthy. Can I leave my jacket with you?’ He put the jacket on the back of my barstool and walked away. I had been to the place, but I hadn’t met Billy so I followed him in the back room and I said, ‘I don’t know you,’ and that’s how we met and that’s how we started talking.”
Later that night, Irene Foster demonstrated that she knew how to hotwire a car, which surprised her soon-to-be husband.
“He was like, ‘Why do you know how to hotwire a car and I don’t,’” she said. “He totally fell in love with me that evening when we met.”
Frenz also had a girlfriend at that point, and the two couples would go on double-dates in Frenz’s Porsche.
“We all jumped in my 928 with the little jump seats in the back, the girls would fit in the back. The boys in the front,” he said. “We all had a good time, going 100miles-an-hour down 95 right to Port Chester after the Connecticut clubs closed.”
Besides being a singer and a veteran, Billy Foster was in way a rarity among men of his generation: A stay-at-home dad.
“Guys who he grew up with, they were manly men, tough guys, dressed to the nines, but would throw an overhand right in a heartbeat,” Preston Foster said. “Bill took on the mantle of stay-at-home dad with no problems, absolutely no problems. His family, his son, needed that.”
Though they both knew it was not common for fathers to stay home with the children, Irene Foster said her husband relished taking care of their two children.
“Now, it’s normal that dads stay home. But then it wasn’t normal that dads would stay home with the kids,” Irene Foster said. “Our daughter, she was born blonde, blonde curly hair, and Billy’s Black and I’m blonde, but he would go to Greenwich, to Bruce Park, to the playground. One day I come home from work and he says, ‘You won’t believe what they asked me today.’ I said, ‘What is it? And he goes, ‘How is it to be a male nanny?’ But he took tremendous care of kids, from changing diapers to taking them to the park to making sure they eat to making sure everything, everything.”
That being said, Billy Foster was not afraid to get in a scrap from time to time.
“When Billy and the Showmen were a young band, they wore these gold and blue iridescent tuxedo jackets, black lapels, bow ties, black pants, and sang Isley Brothers songs and James Brown and stuff like that,” Preston Foster said. “My brother as a teenager would be on stage and if he saw a guy mishandling a gal, he would jump from the stage and throw that overhand right, jump back on stage and finish a love song.”