Mike Foley sells Frosty Boy in Belleville after 32 years

Mike Foley said he liked to hire 14 year olds to work at Frosty Boy. It takes a long time to train them to make ice creams look pretty and not to rush if there is a line.
He would hire four every year and they would stay with him for the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades. He said he would have their parents or guardians come in for an orientation, where he would go over the rules.
Then, on a Saturday afternoon, he would sit at a table with them and watch people getting out of their cars and coming into the shop. He would ask them what they saw.
There were families, grandmas, moms and dads, sons and daughters and 99.9% of the customers were happy.
“They were very, very happy to be there,” Foley said to the trainees. “Don’t mess that up.”
That’s what he’s going to miss – the happy customers — he said on Friday as he sat down with the Independent after selling the shop he had owned and loved for 32 years.
He said while other business owners in town would talk about grumpy customers, the Frosty Boy customers were always happy.
“We never had a bad day,” he said.
Foley, who will turn 66 on April 24, grew up in Garden City and graduated from Garden City West High School. He said he was a troubled teen and got into a lot of trouble until about 1984 when he was working as a crane operator and the owner of Hercules Steel noticed his work and offered him three times what he was making to come work for him.
He worked there until 1988 and saved his money. He married Shirley in 1988 and they tried to buy Frosty Boy in 1988 but was outbid by Kurt Williams. Williams tried to run it as an absentee owner and that didn’t work out. It became a teenage hangout that scared off families.
Foley said 15-20 teens would park and stand around their cars with loud music blaring and one or two of them with cones. He said it was great for the teens to have a place to go, but very bad for business.
Williams would call the police, but refused to sign a complaint. Williams called Foley after eight months and Foley became the new owner.
Foley told police he would sign complaints for loitering, every time.
“I would stand outside with my broom and dustpan and tell the teens it was over. They couldn’t hang out here any more,” Foley recalls. “In the ’80s and ’90s I was the bad guy. But families started feeling safe,” he said.
Foley said he owned Frosty Boy for 32 years. Before him the owners, besides Williams, were Ruby and Mike Foster for about 10 years, Darryl Raymond, and Ball’s Dairy, with that one maybe being the original.
Foley said he doesn’t have documentation on the owners, but there were maybe five total and he was the longest. He said senior citizens would come in and tell him stories of when they used to work there and they had wooden drawers for the money, instead of a cash register. He said he pulled down the wooden drawers from their storage space and asked them if these were the drawers.
The seniors recalled having to write down the sales on paper.
The new owner of Frosty Boy is Ryan Taylor, who is the State Farm Insurance agent two blocks down Main Street. Foley said he got another offer that was more for the shop, but Taylor was so enthusiastic and talked about all the years he had been coming to Frosty Boy, that Foley sold the property to him.
Foley said after he opened the shop he wanted to give back to the community and so he began sponsoring Little League teams. He said one year he sponsored 12 teams, including four from Pro Card II, a baseball card shop he and a friend owned next door to Frosty Boy.
He said they had the original Pro Card in Westland, Pro Card II in Belleville, and The Old Ballpark in Canton. He said the shop flourished in 1989 through 1993 in Belleville, longer in Westland, and a shorter time in Canton. He said the interest in baseball cards dropped and that was the end of those businesses.
He said in 1989, they kept Frosty Boy open until 5 p.m. Thanksgiving eve and reopened it in January, with a heater in the lobby. They made hamburgers from the fresh ground round and they were favorites with those at the hardware store, Mr. Muffler, and Andrew’s Pharmacy, who would order six at a time.
Foley said he and his wife bought Frosty Boy on April 1, 1989 and ran the place for the first nine years. They would go to the shop at 8:30 or 9 a.m. and get a shopping list. They went to Meijer every day because they needed lettuce, bananas, and fresh ground round beef for the hamburgers.
In August 1997, Shirley died at the age of 36, just 14 weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. He said they had a son aged 6 and a daughter 12.
“I took a whole year off in 1998,” he said, noting his youngest brother Dennis ran the shop for him with his brother Jim.
Foley said Shirley had been a stay-at-home mom and he had these two children to raise and didn’t know how to even turn on the washing machine.
He said he and his children got involved in Arbor Hospice in a group called Starting Over for children who lost a parent under the age of 45. Foley became a facilitator and one year raised $8,000 at Frosty Boy for the group.
He said he began relying on managers and no longer was there 24/7. He said employees he had trained, who were then in their 20s, did a great job. Foley was busy raising his young children. He said his daughter became a troubled teen and at the age of 17 moved into her grandmother’s house. Mikey started working at the shop at age 12 and then would help in the summer when he was home from college.
His son helped out when his dad got ill, but he had no interest in quitting his job to run Frosty Boy.
Foley said when his mother passed in 1990, he began delivering Meals on Wheels in her memory and he would also drive September Days seniors for their lunch and theater trips. He did that until 1997, when Shirley got ill. He said his brother Jimmy started when he did and Jimmy is still there.
Foley recalled his days on the Belleville Downtown Development Authority, the Chamber of Commerce, and Central Business Community.
There was a big uprising of merchants when the city wanted to shut down Main Street completely for a year so it could be rebuilt. He said they said customers could get to stores through the alleys, but some were landlocked, like Frosty Boy.
After the smoke cleared, Main Street was redone one side at a time and it took much longer than a year. It took four years. He said for 19 straight years Frosty Boy had increased in business by 10% or more a year. During the four years of the street construction, he lost 40% of his business. When it was all over, the business again started to build up.
He also had run-ins with the Chamber over closing down the street in front of his shop during Strawberry Festival, which usually was his top weekend of the year.
In August 2019, Foley began losing weight and had stomach problem. He went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with rectal cancer. He had treatment, had a port installed and received chemotherapy and radiation. In April 2020 the tumor was reduced enough to operate.
The surgery was 11 hours long and, “I almost died,” he said. He spent 45 days in the hospital. The family pitched in to run Frosty Boy and then closed because of coronavirus.
In June, a PET scan found one relatively small spot in each lung and one in a lymph node. He said the doctors said it couldn’t be cured, but they could work to maintain his health.
He started another round of chemotherapy last Thursday.