Remembering My Father, Robert T. Reilly

By Eoin Reilly

So my father wrote a lot. He also was from Lowell and ran track with Ed McMahon and Jack Kerouac. Oh…he also had a lot of kids and moved to where he could afford to raise them without crime being involved. And it’s the Lowell Folk Festival today. Normally, I am there having a great time with food and song, but today I am, for my sins, in Boston instead.

Hello to anyone out there reading this. I saw a Boston Globe article by Stephen O’Connor that referenced one of my dad’s books. I still get around fifty dollars a year from it, usually then given to one of the afore-mentioned siblings who is down and out. We pretty much all do that because one of us (or more) is always broke. The Disney film The Fighting Prince of Donegal was based on a book my dad wrote for what we now call “young adults” but which previously were referred to as “Shitheads.” I think he published somewhere around fifteen books. Many were non-fiction, perhaps also written for shitheads. Writing was his avocation. To make money, he was a showman. He did advertising in Nebraska, where his ad campaign for Old Home Bread brought forth C.W. McCall and a really bad movie with a great songwriter (Kris Kristofferson) in it. He also ran for congress as a Democrat in 1970, a voice against the war in Vietnam that nearly made me grow up in D.C., likely to have ended life at a young age with a dirty needle in my arm in some dank place somewhere between Akron and Algiers. He went to war in 1944, promptly getting captured and imprisoned so as to be bombed by allies, have an out-of-body experience after which he returned to his stricken barracks, and then to consume numerous Red Cross chocolate bars as yet another bomb run by us moved along his stalled train car as the Nazis retreated with their commitments further into Germany.

Then he came home. He married my mom and tried to get BC to accept his Jesuitical classwork from before he volunteered for a war worth fighting. They didn’t. He started having kids and worked his education elsewhere. Lots of jobs. A move west after his third kid and just short of his PhD. In philosophy, I think. More kids ensued in Omaha. Seven more, in fact. He started to write, perhaps to keep himself hopeful in what must have been very skint times. Funny, but he never wrote about Lowell. Gramma still lived there, other than her annual trips out to the colonies to see us. He still lost or found his “r’s” from time to time, but the steady in my childhood was the sound of Dad in the attic typing two-fingered on the Smith Corona he bought in 1947 and used until he couldn’t type anymore somewhere approaching or passing the new millennium. Lots of books, articles, letters (he wrote back to everyone who ever wrote him), and dribbles of poems and film scripts were my nighttime sonata. He listened to Harry Belafonte and played (very, very badly) the bongos or the spoons when the muse left him or when his fingers just got tired.

He would be appalled at this stream of consciousness submission, as he once told me that writers edit until they just get too tired. Books on Irish topics intermingled with stories about the tribes of the plains, with the odd bit somewhere in between also making its way to publication. He pretty much always wrote. As the second son, I was supposed to be a priest. The volunteer army was just starting back then, so I got recruiting calls from various branches of the armed forces as well as from the Jesuits (who taught me, somewhat) and the Columban Fathers, who enticed me with promise of little food, hot weather, and disease. Dad just kept writing, but he now had fewer mouths to feed and so took a monstrous cut in salary to leave advertising (which he hated) in order to return to Academia (which he loved, minus the meetings and protocols). He always spoke well, almost reverently, of Jack Kerouac. Two things stuck out from what he told us. Firstly, Kerouac was a patriot and had little time for the hippies and all of my other heroes. Secondly, he was a Catholic. These two things were somehow lost as soon as I read Kerouac rather than heard about how Dad gloried in his writings but sorrowed in his life experiences. An early memory of Kerouac is Dad’s telling me of how Kerouac was offered a scholarship by BC, which the owner of the Lowell Sun attended. When he went to Columbia instead, the owner of the Sun retaliated by firing Kerouac’s father, a printer at the Sun.

My dad was a bit of a stir-stick. He had no tolerance for many things. Some of these things he dealt with by acting the fool. For example, he never convinced us that the Chrysler zooming past us on the interstate actually looked in the rearview mirror to notice my father holding the garage door opener to his mouth as if to report erratic driving to the local enforcers. Other things were of more note. He left the Knights of Columbus in the late 1950s after they refused membership to one of his black friends who was a Catholic of the wrong color. He was part of the group in Omaha led by a boozing (recovered) Jesuit chaplain who saw too much blood in too many wars to maintain any belief that white equals right, engaging in protests at restaurants and factories before Selma and other southern sufferings made the news. He was very proud that I became an immigration lawyer. I know his parsimony was a reflection of his Depression era reality, but so was his belief that a government exists only to serve the commonwealth. Hoboes excepted. He had no truck with hoboes.

So I first read Dharma Bums and went on to too-few other books by Kerouac. Dad said he and Ed McMahon were the “Irish Boys” Kerouac referred to in either The Town and the City or Maggie Cassidy; I don’t remember which. He died in Omaha after completing his set task of burying my mother, who preceded him by six weeks. He left a family that cherishes the written word the way it should be cherished. Two of my siblings have also published books, and others of us have added the odd chapter here and there to some topic of interest. He also, according to the owner (circa 2000-ish) of the Owl Diner, still has gum left under the table there. He wrote, sang, and laughed his way about raising us the way men usually do. His love for my mom was monumental and shows me which way to turn from time to time. I like to think that my trips up to Lowell are things that he still sees and that the hotdogs I eat at Elliot’s differ only in price from the ones he ate there in the 1930s.

Thanks for reading this. Dad makes me grin in his memory.