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Photography by Whitney Curtis
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Carole Foppe was ready to have this baby. She’d already been pregnant for 10 months and had two false labors. But when she arrived at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Belleville, Ill., she had the nagging suspicion that something was wrong. Shortly after their son was rushed from the delivery room, her husband, Ron, was told that the baby had been born without arms.
“I remember putting my hand up halfway between my elbow and my shoulder, and I said, ‘Nothing there…like maybe up to here?’” Ron recalls. “‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘Nothing. It’s just like an earlobe.’” Stunned, Ron broke the news to his wife.
“We’re not treating him any different than any of the other boys,” Carole said. (The couple already had three sons.) “You go out and buy your cigars.”
Later, with her priest by her side, Carole finally saw her son, John. She took the baby out of the blanket and looked him over. “Well, thank God he has legs,” she said.
John was fussy and kept spitting up. The doctors determined that his upper and lower bowel weren’t connected—he’d have to be operated on immediately. He was baptized before being transferred to SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center. “The doctors told me the chances of him surviving were only going to be about 1 in a million,” recalls Ron. John survived the surgery, but he still had major birth defects, including irregularities in both hip sockets. Doctors predicted he’d never be able to walk.
But if there was one thing John had proven, it was that he was resilient.
John Foppe (pronounced fop-ee) sits in his dark-paneled office at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul of St. Louis. The organization’s 41-year-old executive director gesticulates with his foot, pausing to rub his chin thoughtfully with his toes. His father has dubbed him “left-footed,” because that’s the foot he writes with. He doesn’t wear prosthetics and hasn’t since high school.
“I wore them for prom pictures,” he says. “And the girl that I took to prom, she could tell I was very uncomfortable at dinner with them. She was like, ‘Why don’t you just take those things off?’ She didn’t have to tell me twice.”
He never put them back on.
At age 22, Foppe was named one of Ten Outstanding Young Americans by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce. Three popes have blessed him. He’s traveled the world as a motivational speaker and written an autobiography, What’s Your Excuse? Making the Most of What You Have, translated into six languages.
He typed the book with his toes, setting the computer’s keyboard on his office floor. He sends email and messages with his iPhone (with Siri’s help), flipping it out of his pocket with his foot, then using his nose and toes to manipulate it.
“Fifteen minutes into a presentation to the board, I didn’t even realize he didn’t have arms,” says St. Vincent de Paul acting council president Marty Bligh, who hired Foppe as executive director in February.
Last year, Foppe was approached by members of the Illinois General Assembly about running for office, but Foppe declined. “If I ask people for money, it’s not going to be for me,” he says. “I’m going to ask them for money to help people.”
Foppe’s attitude toward life might be described as Zen-like—if it weren’t so deeply rooted in his Catholic faith. “I stink at playing golf,” he says
with a laugh. “There are things that I’m not going to be able to do. But when you accept what you can’t do and you focus on what you can do, you gain more power and you’re not fighting yourself.”
To the cynical, it might sound like motivational banter—and indeed, Foppe sometimes laces his conversation with motivational phrases like “Everything’s within reach if you reach within.” But it’s not disingenuous or canned. A lot of it stems from his mother, who wrote about raising him in a small book, Born with Wings. She made a decision almost as soon as John was born: “I wouldn’t let myself think of anything that he couldn’t do,” she says, “only what he could do.”
John grew up near Breese, Ill., 50 minutes east of St. Louis, where his surname is seen on signs throughout the city: Foppe Amoco, Foppe Ace Hardware, Foppe Insurance Agency. His great-grandfather even helped build St. Augustine’s Catholic Church. Shortly after John was born, his parents built a house with sliding doors and lower light switches to accommodate him, plus enough space for the entire family—including the Foppes’ seven other sons.
Growing up, John swam with his brothers and rode ATVs and horses, but he couldn’t canoe or play certain sports. “I was often jealous of my brothers because they got to do things with my dad that I couldn’t do,” he recalls. He was frequently angry, feeling left out at school. “I don’t know if I doubted the existence of God when I was younger,” he says. “I just always say I didn’t like him—I was just like, ‘You did this to me.’”
As a boy, John relied on others to help him get dressed and go to the bathroom. That is, until his mother called a family meeting one day when 10-year-old John was asleep, telling her other sons that they were no longer allowed to help their brother. “I knew what John was capable to do,” says Carole, recalling how the Rev. Harold Wilke, an armless minister and disability-rights activist, once explained that he wore extra-large pants and suspenders that would spring back up after he used the restroom.
The next morning, when John’s younger brother Ron Jr. refused to help him get dressed, John lashed out at his mother. She was upset but unyielding. Left with little choice, John tried pulling up his pants by hooking a belt loop on his blue jeans to a dresser knob, then a closet hook. Finally, he collapsed in tears. “I just felt totally abandoned,” he recalls. “But I think the other thing was that…if I could put those pants on, it probably meant there were a whole lot of other things I could do and should be doing.”
At last, he wriggled into a pair of sweats.
Foppe taught himself to take notes, crack an egg, drive, open ketchup packets, type, eat linguine, even slow-pitch with his feet. “He had a lot of confidence,” recalls Marge Tebbe, his former gym teacher at Mater Dei Catholic High School. “He wasn’t going to sit back and wait for something—he was just going to do it.”
Working with his feet came naturally to John (though he did one time receive a D in handwriting), and helping him came naturally to his family and friends. “At lunchtime, we would all take turns to carry his tray in the cafeteria,” remembers longtime friend Neil Hustedde. His brother Bill remembers trying to make bike handlebars that extended up to John’s shoulders. It didn’t work. Instead, John drove a golf cart. But he was always willing to try anything, including, years later, learning to ski with Hustedde by using shorter skis and his body weight to turn.
Foppe’s confidence grew. “He wasn’t afraid to ask somebody to go out on a date,” recalls Hustedde. “I wouldn’t really say there was anything serious then, but most girls went out with him.”
“John was always persuasive,” adds Ron Jr.
Two days after being elected president of his diocesan executive youth council, Foppe was selected to travel to Haiti to deliver a check and medical supplies. When Foppe arrived at one hospital, a young boy threw his arms around his waist. Foppe looked down at the boy and assumed that he wanted to be picked up.
“Doesn’t this kid understand why I can’t pick him up?” Foppe wondered. When the boy kept holding on, he grew frustrated. “You can’t even help a little kid,” he thought. It wasn’t until he was on the plane that he realized the boy had been hugging him. “In one moment, that little boy did something I had struggled my entire life to do,” John recalls in his book. “He looked straight past my physical condition, totally accepted me, and responded to me with love.”
“It was really kind of a spiritual awakening for me,” Foppe says. “I wanted to tell other people about the plight of the disadvantaged. I really finally started to understand the whole idea of ‘If you lift up others, you lift up yourself.’”
When he returned to Illinois, Foppe spoke to churches and civic organizations about poverty in Haiti. Soon, reporters were calling. He made a documentary about his life and self-esteem; an updated version, Armed with Hope: The John Foppe Story, is shown in schools across the country.
While a student at Saint Louis University, Foppe transitioned into motivational speaking, and presented to thousands. In 1990, he addressed top military brass at a seminar sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. Among those in the audience was Christian motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. “I was very much impressed that the young man, only 20 years old, could speak so forthrightly and enthusiastically to the heads of the largest companies in the world,” Ziglar later recalled in his book Over the Top.
A year later, after graduating, Foppe became the Ziglar Corporation’s first employee to be hired as a professional speaker from day one. At age 21, he moved to Dallas and began speaking internationally, crisscrossing the U.S. and traveling to places like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Foppe returned to Illinois two years later to be closer to his family, before starting his own company, John P. Foppe Seminars—later Visionary Velocity Worldwide. In 1996, he worked with the Miami Dolphins and coach Jimmy Johnson. “You could just see the fear in the players’ eyes,” recalls Foppe. “They were just scared. To me, it was hardly any different than speaking to a high-school football team.”
Foppe returned to SLU in 2000 to get his master’s degree in social work. “I’ve always been interested in what makes people tick,” says Foppe, who’d considered psychology until a professor told him social work would teach him about individuals and their environment. “That made a lot of sense to a person with a disability,” he says. “I knew my family did an awful lot for me, but my community did a lot, too, and they did some things that my family could never do for me. And I’ve always kind of had a heart for trying to make a difference.”
It was at a speech in Carlyle, Ill., in 2002, that Foppe first met Christine Fulbright. They danced that night until the wee hours, and she invited him to a Labor Day pool party.
He proposed seven weeks later, while they were vacationing in Bermuda.
“I remember we were at the beach, and he dove right into the waves,” she recalls. “I had previously dated somebody who lifted weights and even had competed, and he wouldn’t put his head underwater—and I see this armless guy dive right into a wave. I was like, ‘He’s awesome.’”
“Those two were meant for each other,” says Hustedde. “I’ll bet it was their second date or second time I saw them together that instead of holding hands, she was holding his foot.”
Their wedding was old-fashioned, including the exchange of rings—with John wearing it on his toe, with a hinge to get around the knuckle.
On their honeymoon, Foppe and Christine flew to Rome for a personal audience with Pope John Paul II. “We were laughing that if we didn’t have a blessed marriage, there was something really wrong,” she says. It was the second time Foppe had met a pope—when he was 6, Pope Paul VI blessed him and his father. (“That was like going to heaven,” recalls Ron, who still carries photos from that meeting in his billfold.)
The couple traveled the world, in part due to Foppe’s book. In New Jersey, he spoke at a retreat for the Missionaries of Charity, the order of nuns started by Mother Teresa. For the four years prior to that meeting, the couple had tried unsuccessfully to have their first child. “I asked them to pray for us, that we could have a baby,” he recalls. “They all kind of lit up, because that was just the thing that Mother Teresa did: Infertile couples would come to her and pray with her, and Mother Teresa would say, ‘A year from now, bring me a baby.’”
Christine conceived two months later.
They named her Faith Teresa—“because it took a lot of faith to get her, and Teresa in honor of Mother,” Foppe says. Shortly after Faith was born, the Missionaries of Charity arranged for Foppe and his family to meet Pope Benedict XVI.
At first, Foppe was afraid of being left out of Faith’s life. “I remember telling him, ‘John, your time will come with that baby,’” his mother says. “I think it was the first time in his life that he felt handicapped.” His family made a sling for him to carry her; sometimes, he lifted her with his teeth.
“I tell him not to put things in his mouth because he might choke,” says Faith, speaking with all the sincere gravitas of her four years.
Today, John and Faith go grocery shopping together and play tea party. They also cook, with John leaning over and Faith wrapping her arms tightly around his neck to lift her to the counter, where she grabs cooking utensils for him.
“I see how she takes over helping him in just a matter-of-fact way,” says his brother Bill. “If you observe her, that’ll give you a real insight into how us brothers probably helped him, too—it wasn’t like a big deal.”
Foppe credits Faith, as well as the Missionaries of Charity, with guiding him to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul: With his daughter entering school, he didn’t want to travel as much for speaking engagements.
Granted, Foppe now faces some hurdles.
The society’s reserves have dropped by nearly half over the past several years. At the same time, more people need its services.
But Foppe has never shied from a hurdle. Before joining the Society of St. Vincent de Paul earlier this year, he served for three years as executive director of Community Link, an agency that works with the developmentally disabled.
“People ask me all the time, ‘How have you overcome your handicap?’” he says. “I haven’t. Every day brings a different set of challenges. At 10, it was learning to get my pants on. At 21, it was graduating college and leaving home and moving to Texas. At 41, it’s running this agency and working with a major donor and wondering how the awkwardness of your disability factors into that.”
Nonetheless, Foppe never wishes that he had arms, “even in those moments when you still ache a little,” he says. “I ache a little once in a while, maybe with my daughter; I do wonder about maybe holding a bike as she learns when we take the training wheels off. But I also know that there’s so much that my armlessness has taught her and perspectives that other kids her age don’t have.
“We have a slogan here on our stationery: It says, ‘Help us help others,’” says Foppe. “But I think that’s incomplete. I think it needs to say, ‘Help us help others, and then you’ll help yourself.’ It all comes full circle.”
Perched on a stool in front of the oven, Foppe deftly slips two potholders over each of his feet, pulls a hot cast-iron skillet from the stove, and slips it into the oven by leaning back on the stool.
He tucks a glass of water under his chin without spilling a drop and uses his feet to wipe up the sugar that he spilled on the counter. The Foppes’ Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Paddy, walks through the kitchen looking for the steaks that Christine is grilling. When everything is done, Foppe’s father, who’s visiting, cuts up his steak for him and carries his plate to the dining-room table, where Foppe shuffles forward with a glass of wine between his toes.
While Foppe can seemingly do everything with his toes, including paint watercolors of German landscapes (sometimes including an armless boy in lederhosen), he’s not a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” type.
“I believe in interdependence,” says Foppe. “Interdependence is ‘I help you and you help me, and together we’re more than the sum of our parts.’ One plus one can equal three. It takes a lot of maturity to be able to admit that you need help.”
But Foppe has learned that needing help doesn’t preclude him from helping, that being independent isn’t the same as being alone, and that lifting someone up doesn’t require arms.
