Local Veteran Chosen From a National Movement

As told to The SEI Times by Franklin "Tim" Foster

After a lifetime of service and sacrifice, Greendale Marine Tim Foster is learning to rest

Photos provided by Tim Foster

Franklin "Tim" Foster has spent most of his life showing up for other people. For his country, for his four daughters, for the men he worked beside on construction sites across the US. Now, after the hardest year of his life, the Greendale Marine is finally learning to do something that has never come naturally to him: slow down.

A Dearborn County boyhood

Tim's story starts in Dearborn County, in a childhood that wasn't easy. His grandmother helped raise him and was the one who first brought him to church, a faith that would anchor the rest of his life. For a stretch of his boyhood, he lived near Vevay on Lake Geneva. He remembers it fondly: running the lakeshore, exploring, and meeting everyone he could.

The military was in his blood. His father had served before a medical discharge, and three older cousins came home from Vietnam when Tim was 14. By then, becoming a Marine already felt like his calling.

The Corps and the Kitty Hawk

Tim joined the Marine Corps in 1977 and turned 18 in boot camp in California. He trained as a rifleman before drawing sea duty aboard the USS Kitty Hawk, eventually working his way up to assistant brig warden. His service took him on West Pacific cruises to Hawaii, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.

He flew in helicopters, watched porpoises cut through the open ocean, and saw corners of the world a kid from southeastern Indiana might never have reached. "I got to see a lot of things I wouldn't have seen otherwise," he says. That pride has never left him.

Coming home

Tim came home in 1981 to a thin job market. He got by on odd jobs and the support of his family. Faith and discipline steadied him through the difficult transition back to civilian life. He earned his black belt in martial arts and later ran his own karate school for five years, coaching students all the way to national championships and teaching the art as something physical, mental, and spiritual all at once. Many of the kids he trained are grown adults now.

He married, raised four daughters, and went to work, nearly 50 years of it, in construction. He did carpentry and masonry, and traveled to power plants for chimney work, including a stretch he was proud of: he worked the smokestack side of the job alongside iron workers on plants that were being retrofitted with scrubbers and filters to cut the smoke and emissions going into the air. The work was hard on his body, and today he lives with significant shoulder pain. He kept at it anyway.

Then everything changed. One morning in October 2024, Tim woke up unable to breathe, with chest pains he couldn't ignore. A Marine who, like all Marines, had been trained in basic combat first aid (and who had carried a lifelong interest in it), he rarely went to the doctor, but this time he drove himself to the hospital. The diagnosis was a double blow: pneumonia and cancer. Large B-cell lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, had already spread to his adrenal glands, liver, and abdomen. It was stage 4. He was 65.

Six rounds of the heaviest chemotherapy followed. In March 2025, after months of uncertainty, Tim reached remission.

The hard part of getting better

Remission didn't end the hardship. Stopping work to fight cancer meant losing his insurance, and he fell behind on his house and car payments. He didn't qualify for unemployment because he wasn't cleared to work. That same year, his furnace gave out, and his family heated the house with space heaters and the kitchen oven. It took the VA six months to reach out to him about coverage.

What got them through, he'll tell you, was his community: support from the church, help from neighbors, the steady support of his boss, and temporary disability.

An answered prayer

Then came the kindness. Tim's daughters were followers of Samuel Weidenhofer, the "Kindness Creator" behind For Your Service: 50 Veterans in 50 States in 50 Days, a national movement to make sure one veteran or veteran's family in every state never has to work again. His daughters nominated him, and when Tim learned this past April that he'd been selected, he wept.

Humble to a fault, he says he isn't sure he deserves it, that others have it harder. "It was a prayer answered," he says. "I just had to wait for God's timing."

The kindness has kept coming. Some of the donations have already helped Tim catch up on his car and house payments. And when a local HVAC company, Home Comfort Heating and Cooling of Versailles, Indiana, heard his story, owner Kevin came out to inspect the furnace that had failed the winter before and decided to donate a new one outright. Kevin was so moved by Tim's story that he pledged to gift his services to one person in need every year.

Learning to rest

Today, Tim is retired and on Social Security, though he recently returned to part-time work. His old house still needs help, leaks he can't quite stay ahead of. His boss and his pastor keep reminding him to slow down, and he's trying, day by day, to listen. These days, there's more reason than ever to: his four daughters have given him five granddaughters and two grandsons, a family that keeps growing around him.

What he most wants people to understand is the weight that veterans carry. He went into the Corps knowing, and at peace with, what he might be asked to give. He worries that the freedoms so many enjoy without a second thought come at a cost too easily forgotten. He loves the veterans in this community, and more than anything, he wants them to be seen.

After a lifetime of giving, Tim Foster is finally being given to. And slowly, gratefully, he's learning to rest.

Tim's family has set up a fundraiser to help with his home repairs and medical costs. You can support him here: gofundme.com/f/fys-tim-foster.