A childhood friend remembers when future held little promise
Wayne Budd vividly recalls the day in 1959 when Tom Reilly's life began to change.
They were seniors at Springfield's Cathedral High School, best friends but headed in opposite directions. Budd was bound for Boston College the next fall. Reilly, one of the worst students in the class, was going nowhere.
``You're not college material," Budd remembered the principal, a nun, telling Reilly, who was struggling to graduate in a few months. ``He was crestfallen, but the nun said, `I've got an idea. Springfield Trade has a post-graduate school in oil burner repair. You should go up and check this out.' "
Budd drove his pal to the trade school.
``We go up there and watch a guy repairing a small oil burner," Budd recalled. ``We're watching, watching, watching, and at the end of it Reilly says --" Budd imitated Reilly, lowering his voice and shaking his head -- `` `Nah, I don't wanna do that.' "
After passing up a career in oil burner repair, the boy from Springfield went on to law school, then to be Middlesex district attorney and attorney general of Massachusetts.
One of three Democrats running for governor, Reilly is among the most recognizable politicians in the state. Yet he remains an unusual public figure, known for his rigid, spartan persona. He keeps track of the number of days he exercises each month and in campaign years denies himself his favorite leisure outlet, golf. For 36 years, Reilly and his wife, Ruth, have rented an apartment in Watertown, raising three daughters and moving only once, from one two-family on Palfrey Street to another next door.
Tragedies from his childhood remained almost secret until this year when they became prominent themes of his campaign.
From fatherless teenager who barely graduated high school, Thomas Francis Reilly's journey to prominence was helped by Budd's father and, as they grew older, Budd himself. Fifty-two years after they met in junior high school, Budd, the son of Springfield's first black police officer, and Reilly, the son of Irish immigrants, maintain a deep friendship.
``We're a lot alike in this respect: We always figure that people don't think we're good enough," said Budd, a prominent lawyer and former US attorney. ``One of the reasons Tom works as hard as he does is . . . people have always said `You can't do this, or you don't have what it takes to do that.' That's his whole life, always coming from behind."
Though he has won four elections in 16 years, two each as Middlesex district attorney and as attorney general, Reilly's boyhood in Springfield surfaced only in passing before the gubernatorial campaign. Now, to add a deeper dimension to his image as a steely-eyed prosecutor, the 64-year-old Reilly often talks about his upbringing: the accidental deaths of two older brothers and the premature death of his grief-stricken father, a Springfield city worker.
These are intimate details that friends and close associates say Reilly rarely mentioned in the past. The first time he tried to talk publicly about his brothers, Reilly said, ``I got five words out, and I started crying" during a Globe interview in 1999.
One brother, John, was killed in a bicycle accident shortly before Reilly's birth. Not until he was 10 or 11 did Reilly learn the full story and then only after his father ordered him off a friend's bike.
``You're in a home, and it takes you a while because no one tells you anything, but you realize someone is missing," Reilly said. ``But no one ever sat down and really explained it to me until my brother Jimmy did when he told me why I couldn't have a bike and other kids could."
None of Reilly's three daughters, all now grown, was allowed to have her own bicycle as a child.
When Reilly was 14, his brother James was killed by a piece of earth-moving equipment while doing surveying work at Westover Air Base in Chicopee.
``You're just a kid, and you see them all waiting for you at the driveway when you come home from school, and then they tell you," he said, calling the loss ``shattering."
``He was 12 years older than I was, but we shared the same bedroom and I went everywhere with him," Reilly said. ``You know, I went on dates with him. Imagine going on a date with this guy and his little brother's tagging along?"
After the death, ``I lost interest in school," Reilly said. ``What difference does it make? Why get an education?"
Two years later, his father, Mortimer, died of a heart attack.
``He was a strong man, a very strong man, but losing a second son?" Reilly reflected. ``It was too much for him. . . . It was hell on earth for him."
Reilly credits the deep Roman Catholic faith of his mother, Brigid, who went to Mass every day, for holding the family together. As a boy, Reilly said, he had to be home at 7 o'clock each night to recite the rosary with the family.
Those close to him say the family losses of his youth contribute to Reilly's empathy for victims of crime. To this day, Reilly keeps a photo of Sarah Pryor, abducted at the age of 9 in 1985 when he was a Middlesex prosecutor, on his desk blotter in the attorney general's office. Her slaying is unsolved.
``He said, `I'm covert, and I asked for the language school, and I wanted to learn French,' " Budd recalled. `` `They approved me, but they want me to learn Vietnamese,' " Budd said Reilly told him.
Recalling the exchange, Reilly insisted in an interview this month that he wasn't balking at going to Vietnam, but concerned because at the time he was engaged to marry Ruth Gammons, who was teaching back home in Holyoke.
Budd recalled Reilly said he needed another career. Working in Detroit for
He attended law school at night at Wayne State University in Detroit, where Budd was earning a degree, but dropped out after a semester and then returned to Massachusetts in 1967, enrolling at BC Law School.
Budd also returned to the Bay State about a year later and, as a Massachusetts assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights, he again landed a job for his friend, hiring Reilly as his assistant.
Reilly later worked for three years in the Suffolk district attorney's office before starting a law practice with Budd in 1975. They hired a Northeastern law school gradiate, Ralph C. Martin II, who joined Reilly on District Attorney Scott Harshbarger's staff in Middlesex eight years later, and in 1992 made history in Suffolk County when he became the first African-American district attorney in Massachusetts.
For many years, Reilly, Budd, and Martin regularly played Sunday basketball and touch football with a group of guys on the North Shore. ``We were like a busted flush," recalled Martin, using a poker analogy. ``Tom was the only white guy."
The practice of law opened the door for Reilly's late-in-life transition to politics; he was 40 when he became first assistant district attorney and 48 when he won his first election, succeeding Harshbarger.
Their relationship today is strained, partly because Harshbarger feels snubbed by Reilly. Harshbarger said in an interview that he is keeping open the option of endorsing Deval Patrick, one of Reilly's primary rivals.
Harshbarger has measured praise for his former deputy. ``Tom was just a perfect person to be my first assistant because, first and foremost, he was a prosecutor and a good trial lawyer," Harshbarger, now in private practice, said. ``He set the tone in the office."
But he said: ``One of Tom's great strengths is one of Tom's great weaknesses. . . . He is stubborn. He does not believe in process, and he does go with his gut."
That's a quality that even admirers interviewed for this story said can undermine Reilly, especially when combined with occasional bouts of political tone deafness, as happened last January when Reilly committed the worst gaffe of his career.
At the last minute, he jettisoned Christopher Gabrieli as his choice for running mate and chose instead state Representative Marie St. Fleur of Boston. She withdrew almost immediately after the Globe disclosed her history of tax delinquencies and credit problems. Gabrieli later leaped into the governor's race.
Admirers were dumbfounded that Reilly, usually so disciplined and fastidious, could be so careless. ``I made a mistake, and I take responsibility for that mistake," Reilly said recently.
Politics, Reilly said at the time of the blunder, was never his strong suit. But opponents impute political motive to Reilly's shift on key issues: the immediate income tax rollback (was against, now for), the death penalty (opposed when elected district attorney, in favor since the early 1990s), and same-sex marriage (opposed until February 2005).
Not true, the candidate asserts. Recent state budget surpluses swayed him on taxes, and confronting a remorseless murderer converted him on capital punishment, he said.
On marriage, ``I've moved on, and I think the state has moved on," he said. ``We all have the capacity to grow and see change and to embrace that change."
Mary Breslauer, a senior strategist on Reilly's 1998 campaign for attorney general, broke with him over his opposition to same-sex marriage.
``He's a great guy," she said in an interview. ``But I've come to believe that what he lacks when it comes to our families and our relationships is any real deep empathy."
And yet, many of Reilly's top aides, seven by one count, are openly gay, including his first assistant, Stephanie S. Lovell, who defends him vigorously. ``He has never, ever judged me differently because my partner in life is a woman," Lovell said.
Reilly's friend and haberdasher -- John Airasian, president of Eastern Clothing in Watertown -- recalled a wedding reception in Boston about a year and a half ago when Reilly and another guest who bled maroon and gold mysteriously vanished for a while.
``They went upstairs to watch a BC basketball game," Airasian said.
Reilly loves golf. With a 22 handicap, he has been a member for many years of the Mount Pleasant Golf Club, an unpretentious nine-hole course in Lowell.
But with Reilly, there are rules, and they extend to golf, which is verboten this year.
``Those golf clubs are in the basement, and they will not be taken out until this election is over," Reilly said. ``Any year I'm running for office, I never play golf."
Chronic injuries caused his knees to deteriorate to the point that he had both replaced in 1997. On the night before surgery, he took one more long run. The surgery corrected severe bow-leggedness and converted him to a walking regimen that borders on maniacal.
``He walks and walks and walks and walks," said his wife of 40 years, also a walking enthusiast and by all accounts a fierce competitor (In their running days, she once beat her husband in a charity road race).
The Reillys' middle daughter, Meaghan Haggerty, a mother of three, said that when her dad visits her family in Port Chester, N.Y., he'll often disappear for long walks.
``He'll walk from Port Chester to Greenwich [Conn.] and come back with bags of dessert," she said. The trek over the state line is at least 4 miles each way.
Reilly acknowledges a certain obsessiveness about his fitness workouts, which he says help him deal with stress.
``I always count them, and I always shoot for 26 a month," he said. ``That's how I keep myself accountable. . . . It's what gets me through this. . . . I wouldn't last without it."
Reilly's stern public demeanor is a source of amusement to family and friends who know him as an inveterate practical joker, laughing easily at his own expense.
``He enjoys himself. He laughs at himself a lot," his wife said.
She and her daughters chuckle at the memory of normally careful Reilly popping into Barca's Spa in Watertown Square one Sunday to buy a newspaper and leaving the car running. Returning outside, Reilly, who was then first assistant district attorney of Middlesex County, discovered the car had been stolen (It was found later that day nearby).
At home, Reilly is a serious cook. Italian dishes and grilled foods are specialties, and he likes an audience as he prepares elaborate, multi-entree offerings at family gatherings on Sundays. Parents and children alike described food as the Reilly family's sole extravagance.
Their no-frills lifestyle and Watertown suit them.
When a fire in 2003 forced them to rent for a year in West Roxbury, Ruth returned to Watertown the next day to attend Mass at St. Patrick's Church and walk with her friends.
Airasian, whose family has operated the clothing store in Watertown for 60 years, said the peripatetic attorney general is a familiar sight in the tight, solidly middle-class community.
``He's a low-key guy . . . just like the rest of us," Airasian said, crediting Reilly, in the early 1980s, with helping to rescue the Boys and Girls Club from a shutoff of United Way funds because of errant bookkeeping and, as a member of the town Licensing Board, with reducing the number of shot-and-a-beer joints.
The Reillys own a small cottage in the Hardings Beach section of Chatham, handed down from Ruth's parents, who bought it in 1965. Now valued by the town at $485,000, the house was rented out each summer until last year, when they couldn't find tenants.
``Tom loves it down there, but he doesn't get away much," his wife said.
The Reillys have never bought a house, despite good incomes, preferring instead to pay rent (now $1,200 a month). As attorney general, Reilly's salary is $122,500. Ruth, retired after teaching 38 years, the last 34 at a Belmont elementary school, receives a pension of about $48,000 a year.
Reilly responds bluntly to a question about missing a real estate boom that could have provided financial security.
``It's never been important," he snapped. ``I expect to work till the day I die, and I hope it goes that way. . . . It's a different set of priorities, not priorities for everybody, but I've lived my life the way I set out to live my life." 