Fran Guilbault, for more than 30 years the basketball coach at Hoying's alma mater, St. Henry High, can't recall a single Protestant on any of his teams. And the sparkling hallways at St. Henry, a public school despite its name, are so crowded with tall, blond youngsters that it appears someone is casting another Brady Bunch movie.
But as much as anyone can in this remarkably static environment, where the days and years move by with an assembly-line sameness, Hoying stood apart. From the moment Verne and Sue Hoying's oldest boy played his first organized football game at St. Henry Intermediate School in 1986, the lanky, towheaded youngster, with confidence as prominent as his pug nose, was branded as something special.
``People don't do a lot of vacationing around here,'' said Bob Condon, St. Henry's principal for the last 19 years. ``They pay for their cars and homes, and that's it as far as their lives go. That and high school athletics. They derive a great deal of pleasure and pride from the success of our teams here. So they watch things very, very closely. And when they saw Bobby coming up, the town got really excited.''
It wasn't long until the men who gather for morning coffee and evening beer at Fish Mo's, a bar and restaurant on the western edge of town, figured they might soon have something to hang on the wall beside the Redskins jersey of Jim Lachey, the all-pro tackle and another St. Henry product.
They'd tell visitors then that there was this kid who lived out on Lange Road - a nice boy who each summer helped bale hay on his grandfather's dairy farm, 160 acres along Kremer-Hoying Road - who one day was going to quarterback St. Henry to its first state football championship.
