Beverly Writer Remembers Being 'The Drunkard's Son'

Dennis Foley, author of "The Drunkard's Son," reminisces about his childhood on the South Side with Patch editor Lorraine Swanson.

Beverly Writer Remembers Being 'The Drunkard's Son'

Dennis Foley, author of "The Drunkard's Son," reminisces about his childhood on the South Side with Patch editor Lorraine Swanson.

I’m sitting at Quigley’s South Side Irish Pub on a Wednesday evening with Dennis Foley, a quintessential South Side guy, talking about his book The Drunkard’s Son. Chicago’s version of Angela’s Ashes, the book recounts Foley’s Irish-American rambling childhood from St. Sabina’s Parish to Hometown. His father, John Francis Foley, a polio survivor, casts a shadow over the part-memoir-part-not’s early chapters until he disappears from his six children’s lives, dying at age 43 of alcoholism in 1972. “Dad bounced around tied with the booze,” Foley says, taking a swig of Blue Moon. “He was one of those guys destined to fall. He had polio as a kid, which very few people recovered from, but he came back and walked in high school. He was used to …

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