How Mike Riley ruined my life

By Chris Powell
Mike Riley Retirement Party
The Riverview, Simsbury, Connecticut
Thursday, February 18, 2016

I’ve titled my remarks “How Mike Riley Ruined My Life.” I got the idea from his wife, Kathleen.

I met Mike back around 1970 when he was clerking for state Sen. Bob Houley, Senate chairman of the Appropriations Committee. We spent many happy hours at the state Capitol, playing with the state budget, moving decimal points around, some to the left, some to the right. It would be months before anyone noticed and then it was too late.

After serving two terms in the Senate, by 1972 Houley had gotten to enjoy politics too much and was neglecting his regular job and about to go bankrupt, so he could not afford to seek re-election. The Democratic nomination for state senator in the 35th District was about to go by default to the party’s state central committeewoman, Naomi Hammer of Vernon. They couldn’t find a serious candidate. So on the night before the convention I persuaded Mike to run. We made a few hurried phone calls and the next day Mike was nominated unanimously. As I said, they couldn’t find a serious candidate, but at least it was my candidate.

The rationale for Mike’s candidacy was two-fold. First, that he was good looking, gregarious, and qualified by virtue of his clerking for Houley and his bartending at the Somers Inn. And second, that I would manage the campaign. That is, Mike would do the drinking and I’d do the thinking. (We thought about putting that one on a bumper sticker.) Mike would get the title and glory of being a senator and I would get his gratitude: a patronage appointment high enough in state government but also out of the way enough that I might never have to work again.

I was thinking of a position like the one held by the building supervisor of the water treatment plant in Cadiz, Spain, who was in the news this week. He skipped work for six years while staying on the payroll. They never would have caught him if they hadn’t decided to give him an award for loyalty and then couldn’t find him. So he was fired and had to give some of the money back.

Of course something like that would never happen in government in Connecticut – the firing and fining, I mean.

Anyway, that was my dream as Mike’s campaign began. One night soon after the convention I met Mike at the Somers Inn to work on his campaign brochure. That night I made the mistake of doing both the thinking and the drinking.

We did just about finish the brochure that night, but at closing time Mike and Pam Reid had to walk me up and down Springfield Road until I stopped throwing up and could stand on my own. Then they placed me gently on the floor in the loft next to the inn. At dawn we went up on the balcony of the inn and took Mike’s photo for the cover of the brochure, a copy of which has been placed at every table. Mike was never more handsome than he was that day, but if you look closely at the photo you may see under his eyes the evidence that he had stayed up even later than I had – being gregarious, no doubt.

As you’ll also see from the brochure, Mike had detailed positions on dozens of issues. Of course we did the brochure that way so Mike didn’t have to remember all his positions. As another bit of clever campaign strategy, whose purpose I can’t quite recall now, we also printed more brochures than there were residents of the 35th District. Maybe we were anticipating this retirement dinner.

Of course 1972 turned out to be a disaster for the Democratic Party nationally and in Connecticut. President Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia for the Republicans, and here in Connecticut the Democrats lost both houses of the General Assembly.

Mike carried Ashford, thanks to its large Democratic hillbilly population. He carried Stafford because people there somehow thought Riley sounded Italian. He carried Willington and Mansfield because those towns were full of dopehead UConn students and state employees. And he carried his home town, Somers, by 21 votes, the margin there being provided by members of Mike’s own family — the first and last time the Rileys were around when you needed them.

Unfortunately there were 10 other towns in the 35th District and when their votes were added Mike lost the election by 1,693 votes. But having gotten 43 percent of the vote in the district, Mike led the Democratic ticket in the 35th. I decided to take this 43 percent as proof of my political genius.

So I was looking forward to Mike’s running again in 1974, which was to be as much a Democratic year as 1972 had been a Republican year. The Republican who had defeated Mike, Tom Carruthers, had turned out to be as big a schmuck as Nixon was. But because Bob Houley thought he had straightened out his regular job, he wanted to go back to the Senate, and Mike deferred to him. Houley got the Democratic nomination, was easily elected, returned to the Appropriations chairmanship, and took Mike with him. I was stuck in the newspaper business.

Another opportunity to run awaited Mike when Houley retired from the Senate in 1978. But instead Mike went to work for Chris Dodd, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and soon to be a U.S. senator.

Mike’s most heroic service to Dodd came when he reluctantly accepted the senator’s assignment to return to Somers to meet with a constituent who was pestering Dodd to introduce legislation in Congress to outlaw Polish jokes. So Mike had to spend an evening at the constituent’s house trying to maintain a straight face while the constituent indignantly recited one Polish joke after another. “What’s the grand prize in the Polish lottery? A dollar a year for a million years.” That kind of stuff.

To survive that evening Mike had to tense his facial muscles so tightly that when he finally left the house and let go, they all tore loose. That’s why he looks as he does today. It’s not that he’s old. It was that awful night of the Polish jokes.

After working in Dodd’s office, Mike got into the trucking business. Realizing at last that there wasn’t going to be anything in it for me, I gave up on him.

So, Mike, I hope you’re happy now. As was said in “On the Waterfront,” you could have had class; you could have been a contender. And I could have been liquor control commissioner.

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