ONE BRICK AT A TIME

Kenny Foeste inducted into the Masonry Hall of Fame

Kenny Foeste of Cape Girardeau tends to his duties on the job Wednesday, June 12, 2019, at what will become the Cape Girardeau County Justice Center in Jackson. Foeste got his start in the masonry business in the early 1960s. In January, the 78-year-old was inducted into the Masonry Hall of Fame. Jacob Wiegand ~ jwiegand@semissourian.com

For local mason Kenny Foeste, becoming the newest member of the Masonry Hall of Fame started with a simple letter. A nomination, really. A written legacy of a life well-lived and a job well done. A job that is far from over and a legacy that will continue on for years. A letter filled with a granddaughter’s praise and adoration for a grandfather she has known her whole life as a hardworking and respectable man.

Kenny Foeste of Cape Girardeau parks a truck after its use on the job Wednesday, June 12, 2019, in Jackson. Jacob Wiegand ~ jwiegand@semissourian.com

Foeste was born and raised in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Most people in this town know him as president and owner of Kenneth E. Foeste Masonry, Inc., and though he’s been in this business a long time, it wasn’t something that was handed to him, and he didn’t start at the top.

As a young man in the early 1960s, Foeste worked on the river. But about a week after he was married, he realized that working 30 days on and 15 days off for the pay of $375 a month wasn’t going to cut it.

“I decided to look for a better job and stumbled into it,” Foeste says. “One day while walking down Spanish Street, I saw a man laying brick. I asked him for a job, and he hired me as a hod carrier. That’s how I started my career.”

Hod carriers are the laborers, now called mason tenders, who carry the brick and mortar supplies and assist the brick layers. It was from that position that Foeste learned the ropes and eventually progressed into a bricklayer apprentice program, becoming a journeyman bricklayer in 1969. Four years later, he and his wife, Judy, started their own company, and bit by bit they acquired bigger equipment. With the bigger equipment came bigger projects.

Over time, Foeste Masonry, Inc. has become the largest mason contractor between St. Louis and Memphis, Tennessee. Some of their largest projects include the Procter & Gamble Paper Making Plant in 1999, the United States Federal Courthouse in Cape Girardeau in 2006 and the Jackson High School addition in 2008.

Built on hard work, knowledge and ethic, this company has become a thriving family business. And owning a business is a 24/7 job that requires the assistance of more than 20 key people, including many of Foeste’s own children and grandchildren.

“I’m very proud of all my kids and grandkids,” says Foeste, who currently has two grandsons going through masonry trade school.

The trade school has become a partnership between Foeste and local academic institutions, to offer apprenticeship training in a four-year program, designed to keep new people coming into the masonry field. Students attend school, but most of the training comes from direct work on the job site. At the completion of the program, students are required to pass a skills test before earning the journeyman card. And one way to have fun while practicing masonry skills is participating in the Bricklayers 500, a competition of craft to lay the most bricks in one hour. Both of Foeste’s grandsons entered the competition at the MCAA Annual World of Concrete Convention in Las Vegas in February.

Several members of the Foeste Masonry team accompanied Kenny and his wife to the trade show to watch the competition and cheer them on. It was during that time that Foeste realized he had been nominated for the 2019 Masonry Hall of Fame by his granddaughter, Ashley Sparkman.

“I had no idea what was gonna happen,” says Foeste, who had never been recognized for this type of award before.

The previous winners of the Hall of Fame cast votes for the nominated candidates, and in the end, Foeste became one of six new inductees honored at the event. The celebration consisted of dinner, conversation and a new set of clothes. Directly after the event, Foeste was interviewed with Masonry Magazine and later received a plaque recognizing the award. But since his return home from the convention, life has pretty much stayed the same.

He still wakes early every morning and prepares for the day. He is the first one to work and the last one to leave. When he’s not in the office or in the field, he self-reportedly “goes to church and goes to bed,” though his wife, Judy Foeste, claims there’s a little more to the story.

“We like to travel when we can. We have a very competent team and a staff that runs smoothly,” Judy says. “But with 10 grandkids and 12 great-grandkids, you’ll usually find us watching them play sports.”

Which proves that work and play might just be the key to a successful life. A life of business and family, of labor and love. And if we’re being honest, a little humor doesn’t hurt, either. Kenny has been known to tease the guys from time to time with rhymes like, “You can lay ‘em fast, or you can lay ‘em slow, but if you don’t lay ‘em to the line, you gotta go.” Or this one, regarding pay: “If you’re not spreading mortar by 7, I’ll have your check by 11.”

It’s this type of energetic leadership around the workplace and the home that encouraged the nomination letter for the Masonry Hall of Fame. A letter from his granddaughter that ended like this: “Masonry has been his life and his passion for the past 54 years. People in the Southeast Missouri region and communities who know of him, know his business and his work ethic, and will always associate the masonry trade with his name.”