Brad DeLong
>Financial Times - November 27, 2002
>
>Arab frustration at US spills into violence
>Roula Khalaf in London and Charles Clover in Kuwait
>
>...In Jordan on Sunday, a Pizza Hut outlet was set alight in Aqaba.
>The incident followed the killing of Laurence Foley, a US aid
>official in late October...
Laurence Foley's career of helping people, which ended this week at the hand of a gunman in Jordan, flourished in Contra Costa County more than 30 years ago, working with kids on probation. "He saw it as another way to help people who had a poor start in life," said Ron Atkinson, a probation supervisor who worked for Foley in the 1970s, when they were both at the Contra Costa County Probation Department. "He devoted himself to public service."
That public service, which included the past 14 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development, took Foley from California to Bolivia, Peru, Zimbabwe and, finally, to Jordan. Despite these world travels, Foley, 60, and his wife, Virginia, always kept their home in the Oakland hills, where they had raised their three children from the mid-1970s to late 1980s, as home base. But for many years, the house has been rented out. "They always felt someday they might come back," said former neighbor Tom Knepell. "They felt comfortable here."
Atkinson remembered Foley, who worked in the probation department from 1969 to 1980, as a "very bright, very humorous, very sociable guy with real leadership abilities." "It's a tremendous loss," he said of Foley's slaying.
"Larry strove to make the world a better place than he found it," said Andrew Natsios, the USAID administrator in Washington. "No one in USAID embodied the spirit of compassion and brotherhood that underpins our efforts more than Larry Foley." Edward Gnehm, U.S. Ambassador to Jordan, his voice trembling, said Foley's accomplishments included bringing clean drinking water to more Jordanians, rehabilitating health care centers and running a small business loan service.
Gnehm quoted Foley's widow as saying that he felt at home in Jordan. Foley told his wife, "I am where I want to be, doing what I want to do." A native of Massachusetts, Foley moved to the Bay Area and earned a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling from San Francisco State University in 1969. After he began working for the probation department, he and Virginia bought their Oakland home.
The couple were "the center of neighborhood activity," hosting Kentucky Derby parties, checking in on elderly neighbors and arranging yearly caravans to cut down Christmas trees in Sonoma, said Knepell. But neighbors knew the couple, who had met in the Peace Corps in India in the mid-1960s, loved living and working abroad. They returned to Peace Corps service in 1980, taking their three children to the Philippines for five years. "That convinced them they wanted an international life," Knepell said.
When they returned to Oakland in 1985, Foley began pursuing a job with USAID, he said. But while waiting for his security clearances, Foley spent two years as director of administrative services for Rehabilitation Services of Northern California, a Pleasant Hill-based organization that works with the disabled and Alzheimer's patients. Despite their years abroad, the Foleys still returned to Oakland to visit, as recently as this summer, friends said.