view issue - PrimeTime Cape Cod

24 MAY 2011
Devon
Foley’s home
is decorated
with art that
she has created,including
these
three paintings.
As a
child, Devon
loved to draw
and paint
animals and
create works
of art from
objects found
in nature. Her
mother told
her she had
to get a real
job. Now in
the second
act of life,
after raising
her children
and a career
in nursing,
she gets to
be the artist
she always
was inside.
DEvON FOlEY
Realizing the artist within after motherhood
and a career in nursing.
About the author
Kathy Salzberg is an award-winning
writer, pet groomer and business owner
who retired to the Cape in 2005. She has
written many articles on pets for national
magazines, authored three books and
co-written a fourth. She is the resident
grooming expert on www.thedogchannel.
com. One of her stories was recently selected
for Chicken Soup for the Soul’s “Loving
Our Dogs – Our 101 Best Stories.” A
widow with three grown children and
five grandchildren, Kathy is a member of
Nauset Newcomers, where she has made
many new friends and met her new life
partner, artist/designer Lee Ackerman.
They share their Eastham home with a
tabby cat with serious control issues.
By Kathy SalzBerg
What do you want to be
when you grow up?
Sometimes the answer to
this age-old question can
take a lifetime to realize,
but artist Devon Foley of Orleans, Mass.,
and Naples, Fla., was blessed with a second
chance to do what she loved best as
a child: express herself through art, drawing
and painting animals and creating art
from objects found in nature.
“I loved drawing as a child but my
mother told me, ‘You can’t be an artist.
You have to have a real job! You have to
be a teacher, a secretary or a nurse.’”
Now 64 and retired, Devon’s “real job”
was a nursing career to be proud of. After
graduating from high school in New
Jersey, she received a bachelor’s degree
in natural sciences from the University
Merrily CaSSidy/Cape Cod tiMeS
of Dubuque, then headed to Boston
Children’s Hospital School of Nursing,
where she trained for her profession and
met Jerry, her husband of 41 years, then a
student at Boston College.
Devon later worked as a medical/surgical
nurse at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital
(now Brigham and Women’s), trained
nurses’ aides at a nursing home and
worked in labor and delivery at South
Shore Hospital, where she also taught
childbirth classes. When her husband’s
career as a CPA and eventual partner with
global financial giant Ernst and Young
took them to Albany, N.Y., Devon worked
at Wildwood, a private school for children
with developmental disabilities.
Along with their moves, the couple had
three children who are now adults, two
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