The Decision

The neighbors on San Francisco's Geary Boulevard were excited this week about the breakup of the Fosters, who have been married for 25 years. But it was not the usual kind of family breakup. Don Foster was setting out to be a monk and, if all goes well, his wife May will become a nun.

The Fosters had had a good life together. Don got a high-school education, worked for 15 years as a San Francisco newspaper man, served in the Navy during both world wars, always managed to make a comfortable living. Recently, while he held down a $5,200-a-year job on the State Board of Equalization, he and May also operated a "Hobby Center," which last year grossed $56,000. But for a couple of decades, quietly devout Donald Foster has been thinking that he would like the cloistered seclusion of a monk's life. "The more I thought about it and talked to May," he explained when his decision was finally made, "the more I kept realizing that we aren't created just for time; the main reason we're created is for eternity. You can't keep your worldly goods, but you can save your soul."

Year after year, the Fosters had talked it over and prayed about it. Their only child, Marjorie Jean, became a nun when she was 17. Last November stocky Donald Foster, 50, decided that the time had come. After asking his pastor's advice, he wrote to the Rt. Rev. Alcuin Deutsch, of St. John's Abbey at Collegeville, Minn., and got an airmail reply. With a doctor's certificate of good health, he would be accepted for a year of study at the monastery before entering the novitiate.

Intense, thin-faced May Foster hopes to go into a convent, but she is waiting for a year to wind up their worldly affairs and make sure her husband is well started on his new road. Says the wife who may never see her husband again after this week: "Some people think I'm terrible, letting him go off like this after all these years of marriage, but it's God's will. Besides, if I could give him to his country, never knowing that he'd get back from the Leyte invasion, why can't I give him to his God?"

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