Alice Foley, early AIDS activist as Provincetown nurse; at 76

"I still remember walking in and seeing the young man," she recalled in John-Manuel Andriote's book, "Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America."

"He was covered in what I know now to be Kaposi's. I never saw anything like that in my life. It looked like someone took a paintbrush and shook purple paint at him. He was very, very sick. He didn't have any help, and died within a week. That really sent up a flag that this was a serious situation."

The 1981 encounter with a friend's friend who had Kaposi's sarcoma, lesions that are an AIDS complication, would be among hundreds of AIDS-related deaths Ms. Foley experienced as the relatively unknown illness wreaked havoc on Provincetown.

Each weekend, she and her friends would recall, there were memorial services to honor the latest victims, and Ms. Foley, who knew her patients well, often spoke at the services.

Ms. Foley, a former director of public health for Provincetown who started an AIDS victim support group and later ran a restaurant, died in her sleep from heart failure on April 19 in her Provincetown home. She was 76.

For Ms. Foley, grim cases came to her doorstep regularly.

When a young gay man drove to Boston from Colorado to seek top medical care, he was diagnosed with AIDS and a social worker suggested that he go to Provincetown to gain support from its growing gay community.

"This was November," Ms. Foley recalled in Andriote's book, "which is a terrible time to come here if you have no work."

But she and others rallied around him, helped him enroll in Meals on Wheels, and discussed ways to help the handful of others sharing his condition. During cooler seasons, absent the tourist influx, transportation to hospitals was limited.

So, in the early 1980s, Ms. Foley started up the Provincetown AIDS Support Group, which helped coordinate rides into Boston. The group also pushed hard to get home care provided to those affected.

"Her sense of urgency and emergency brought many people to this effort," said a niece, Susan Erickson of Newton.

Ms. Foley grew up in Cambridge, the daughter of a seamstress and a postal carrier. She graduated from the old Cambridge High and Latin School in the mid-1940s and attended nursing school at Cambridge City Hospital. She earned her master's degree in nursing at Boston College in the mid-1950s.

She worked for about two decades at what is now Cambridge City Hospital as well as what was then the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham.

In 1970, she moved to Provincetown, drawn by its growing gay and lesbian community.

In 1980, she became the town nurse, or director of public health, for 13 years.

She then turned her attention to fighting the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which can lead to AIDS, and guiding the support group she formed.

She was thrilled at being appointed to Governor William F. Weld's Commission for Gay and Lesbian Youth in the early 1990s, family said.

In 1996, her pioneering work with AIDS patients was honored when the support group opened a residential facility for AIDS and HIV patients in Provincetown and named it the Foley House.

"There was the loving and compassionate side of her and the tough, street-fighter side of her," said Irene Rabinowitz, who worked with Ms. Foley. "She was definitely a believer in the impossible."

In addition to her niece in Newton, Ms. Foley leaves two sisters, Ann Kiely of Burlington and Mary Patricia Erickson of Arlington; five nephews; and three nieces.

A memorial service will be held today at 1:30 p.m. in the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown.