Glendo Native Creates Life-Size Moose From Junk Parts For Breast Cancer Fundraiser

Wyoming native Bill Foy enjoys salvaging old wrenches, hammer heads, broken pocketknives and discarded license plates.

He also is not above searching through old ranch junk piles as part of his quest.

That’s where he finds the rusty metal most would throw away and transforms into prized works of art that one can also auction at a fundraiser or place prominently at a business or in a yard.

“I hate to see stuff sold to the scrapyard, ground up and put on a rail car and sent to China,” he said.

A welder since the seventh grade, Foy began using his skills fixing broken farm and ranch equipment at his Platte, Colorado, welding shop into artistic sculptures as well. 

One of his latest pieces, a moose called “Holy Smokes,” he made specifically to be donated to the Glendo, Wyoming, Marge Cares Foundation.

The all-metal nearly life-size moose made from horseshoes, open-end box wrenches, a padlock, pocketknife, and other sundry metal pieces straight from a grandpa’s garage, has been on display in Douglas and Casper to draw interest to the foundation’s upcoming fundraiser.

“I knew Marge Wilson and I know Britt,” Foy said. “It’s a nice thing for a small community to be able to (do.) I think last year they gave out $65,000 and it’s a good cause.”

Britt Wilson, the late Marjorie Wilson’s husband and foundation board member, said he grew up with Foy and appreciates the generous donation of the moose. 

Marge Cares Foundation

The Marge Cares Foundation started in 2011 as his wife battled through the last few months of her life with breast cancer. The nonprofit is something his wife wanted to do to help others enduring the same kind of travel needs she had in her five-year fight with the disease, Britt Wilson said.

Marge Wilson was a nurse who obtained her degree from the University of Wyoming where she met Britt, who grew up on a ranch in Glendo. When the couple moved back to Glendo in 1991, she worked at Memorial Hospital of Converse County in Douglas. In 2006, she was diagnosed with stage four cancer.

While the foundation started initially to assist Glendo residents, Britt Wilson said it has now grown to being able to help people from around the state, noting that many people must travel for dialysis and children needing hospital care in eastern Wyoming get sent to Denver.

“What we do is give $500 a check to each person, no paperwork involved, we don’t want to turn this into a bureaucratic thing,” he said.

Wilson said with Foy donating his moose for the fundraiser this year, the foundation’s board led by President Candy Underwood Geringer decided to have an online auction this year as part of their annual fundraiser the last Saturday in April.

Wilson said the McPherson Auction and Realty of South Dakota is conducting the auction and details of how to bid on Foy’s moose will be on the foundation’s Facebook page by early April.

People in Casper can see Foy’s “Holy Smokes” in the parking lot outside Rocky Mountain Discount Sports on CY Avenue in Casper. 

Foy’s Art Beginnings

Foy’s moose is just the latest near life-size sculpture formed from the 66-year-old’s welding rods. Foy said it all began when he saw a photo of a welded art piece of a horse pulling a plow on Pinterest. He printed the picture and put it up on his shop wall.

“I looked at it and told myself, ‘Man, I wish I could do that,’” he said. After two years of looking at it on the wall, he tried to make his own version of a horse pulling a plow. It now sits at a golf course in Fort Lupton, Colorado.

He has since made moose, elk, deer, bison, Indian riders on horses, and cowboys on horses — all will scrap tools, metal, and a lot of imagination.

“The beauty of it is that they don’t have to be functioning tools, and they don’t have to have all the components,” he said. “Parts can be bent and broken, but I feel like they spark a conversation across generations.”

Foy said kids may stand around his sculptures and see something that they remember from their grandpa, while the “old guys stand around them for hours” and point out something they recognize and tell a story related to the object from their past.

All the components of his sculptures must be weldable and much of the items he uses are cast iron, which still work although the material is not as good as malleable iron. Foy does not use aluminum and rejects most shiny items that people may give him to include on a piece.

One signature item he includes in every sculpture are brass knuckles he actually fashions out of steel. Those can be seen on “Holy Smokes” under its left antler and on the right side of the moose’s face.

Foy’s process for a piece is to draw out the silhouette on 1/8-inch sheet steel and then cut it. He then hangs it from a forklift where he will build out the legs

“Once he’s free standing, I just start adding the parts,” he said. “Of course, the antlers take a long time on moose and elk.”

For his buffalo pieces, he uses chain to fashion the head and front half of the animal to give a wooly appearance from a distance. His horses feature a round tractor flywheel or cast-iron frying pan for the circular biology of the horse’s jaw.

Elk That Moves

A favorite sculpture is of an elk that Foy has installed in his front yard. He put a garage-door opener inside it that allows him to raise its head back and bugle at the push of a button.

“People don’t realize that when they’re out looking at him,” he said. “And if I can see them out the window, I’ll hit the button and scare the crap out of them.”

A typical project takes him about two months to do. He cannot devote full time to it because he still has to pay the bills and continues to operate his welding business. One day he hopes to do art full time.

He has another moose he’s currently working on.

“In the spring. I'm hoping to load this moose I have now, and maybe the buffalo that I have now on a trailer and haul them up through Jackson and up to Bozeman and back,” Foy said. “I would hope to generate some sales off of that, you know, if I could ever get where I could have some standing orders, then I would just do this exclusively.”

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.