Ruth Reilly a quiet, constant force in AG's life

One in a series of profiles on the spouses of Massachusetts gubernatorial candidates.

WATERTOWN -- When a fire ripped through their apartment three years ago, destroying nearly everything they owned, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly and his wife, Ruth, moved away from Palfrey Street for the first time in 33 years. They rented a condo in West Roxbury.

But Ruth Reilly never really left Watertown. Every morning for a year, she drove her navy blue 1999 Toyota Camry back to the old neighborhood to attend 7:30 a.m. Mass at St. Patrick Catholic Church, just as always. Then, she and her best friend, Linda York, would set off for their usual 4-mile walk. When their apartment in the two-family house in Watertown was finally rebuilt, the Reillys moved back in, and everything was much as it had always been.

``That was my routine; that was my life," Reilly said in an interview the other day. ``I wasn't going to change it just because I was living in West Roxbury. That's what began my day every day so keep it up."

Ruth Reilly knows what she likes, and the boundaries of her world are as broad as she needs them to be. Those who know her well use the same words to describe her: solid, organized, unpretentious, dedicated, extremely private. She has large, blue-gray eyes, wire-rimmed glasses, and wears her hair in a neat bob, freshened about every six weeks. She loves Patricia Cornwell mysteries, prefers slacks to skirts, shops at Talbots but would much rather spend the afternoon watching a hockey game. She is pleasant but not gushing, laughs easily, but clips her sentences short.

Reilly, 65, devoted her life to raising her daughters -- Leslie is now 37, Meaghan is 32, and Kyle is 26 -- and teaching third- and fourth graders at the Daniel Butler Elementary School in Belmont. As her husband rose from private lawyer to Middlesex district attorney to attorney general and then jumped into the governor's race, she returned, year after year, to the same little brick elementary school in an unfancy part of town to teach another batch of children their multiplication tables.

``Mom is definitely the quiet force behind him," said Leslie Flaherty, her eldest daughter.

Now that Hilary Gabrieli, the wife of Reilly's Democratic gubernatorial primary rival Christopher Gabrieli, has cast aside her reserve and starred in a campaign commercial, Ruth Reilly holds the unofficial title of least publicly visible spouse on the campaign trail. She has occasionally introduced Reilly to a small audience, and she has appeared with him at the state party convention and some of the debates. But she is just as happy stuffing envelopes at the campaign headquarters.

``I don't feel comfortable speaking in front of people," she said, adding with a laugh, ``only 9-year-olds."

She says she reads the papers every day, but she refuses to discuss her own political views or how they might differ from her husband's. ``I don't get involved in political issues," she said. At home, she said, she and her husband talk sparingly about the campaign.

``When you get home, it's time to relax, watch a game," she said. ``Let's not talk about what we did all day."

Ruth Reilly insists she had no reservations about her husband's decision to run for governor; both she and her husband said he never would have run without his wife's support. But York, her closest friend, said the campaign and the sometimes negative media coverage has been difficult for Ruth Reilly, whom she described as ``very astute, very well read."

``It's just such a public thing, and she's a very private person," York said. ``They had to sit down and have some pretty good talks about this. This was what he really wanted to do, so she said, `All right, I'll support you as best I can.' "

That, the Reillys say, is how their relationship works: When one feels very strongly about something, the other rallies behind the decision. A favorite family story recounts that after Tom Reilly had just won his race for Middlesex district attorney in 1990, Ruth felt that her youngest daughter, Kyle, then 10, had not been spending enough time with her father, so she announced to her husband that she had gotten the two of them a paper route. Past tense.

``I thought she was kidding," Tom Reilly said in an interview the other day.

For the next three years, the newly minted DA and his daughter rose before dawn to deliver the Globe to their Watertown neighbors. He now calls it a ``brilliant" plan.

``We just got up, and that was our time," he said. ``We'd talk about everything that was going on. She was reconnecting me with my youngest daughter."

It is that sort of strategic thinking that made Ruth Reilly a gifted teacher, the career she had wanted since she was a little girl who played school with her dolls.

Sharon Matthews, a reading specialist at the Butler School, recalled one little boy who struggled academically and barely had a friend to call his own. When Reilly discovered that he was fascinated with Henry Ford, she encouraged him, assigning him special research projects and discreetly ``talking him up to the class." Before long, he was flourishing, Matthews said.

``I think the genius of it was, the class turned around," Matthews said. ``It was the way he began to look in the eyes of everyone else . . . so it was the class that would begin to think, `This kid is really OK.' "

Reilly retired from teaching in 2003, but still returns to the Butler School two or three days a week as a volunteer. She wanted to be interviewed for this story in the cheery upstairs room where she tutors children in reading and writing.

``Please excuse the get-ready-for-school look," she said, ushering a reporter and a campaign aide down one of the Butler School's darkened corridors, crowded with desks and chairs. On one wall was a drawing by a student in her last fourth-grade class. ``Mrs. Reilly rocks!" the child wrote.

Born Ruth Gammons, she grew up in Holyoke, the daughter of a salesman, first for Sunshine Biscuits -- ``We had lots of cookies in the house" -- then for Wyeth Laboratories. Her mother owned a beauty salon downtown. Her grandmother lived with the family, and her mother was one of 10 siblings who all lived in the same neighborhood.

``There were six streets with an aunt on every street," she said.

It was a comfortable life run by small-town ritual: school, Mass every Sunday, a family vacation the middle two weeks of August. Punctuating each year were traditions such as the St. Patrick's Day parade, held a week after South Boston's, where she has a blurry recollection of once meeting a young John F. Kennedy.

She was voted friendliest in Holyoke High School's Class of 1959 and went on to Our Lady of the Elms in Chicopee, a small, all-women's Catholic college, living at home while she studied to be a teacher.

The one regret Reilly still feels keenly is that in those pre-Title IX days, she had to settle for cheerleading. Her father raised her to be a rabid Red Sox fan, teaching her to score the games; she loved to play field hockey in gym class and capture the flag on the playground.

``She would always say how lucky we were to be able to play sports." Flaherty said.

As a mother, she encouraged her daughters' every athletic whim. The Reilly girls became accomplished athletes, excelling at field hockey, basketball, and track at Watertown High School. Leslie played field hockey at Holy Cross, and Meaghan played at Boston College and was named an all-American in her senior year.

She went to almost every one of their games and then some. The Reillys have had season tickets to Boston College football games since the early 1980s, later adding basketball and then ice hockey to the collection.

``The best part about Meghan playing at BC was that we'd go watch Meghan and then walk down the hall and watch an ice hockey game," said York, whose brother-in-law, Jerry, coaches BC's men's ice hockey team. ``It was a two-for-one-er."

It was fitting, then, that her first date with Tom Reilly was going to a football game. They met when mutual friends, secretly plotting to set them up, took Ruth shopping to Steiger's department store in Springfield, where Tom was a stockboy. He came by with his cart and soon after invited Ruth to an American International College football game. To Ruth, it was just the thing.

Tom Reilly, then 19, said he knew that day that he wanted to marry her. ``She's special," he says now. ``She was beautiful, and her character came through on that first date."

They celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last month. Even though their children are grown -- the older two are married, with six children among them -- the Reillys make time every Sunday for their traditional family dinner. It is his wife's idea of happiness.

``You go into her house, and there's really no artwork or anything, just all family pictures," York said. ``That's who she is."