David Riley

Thanks very much for including me in this reunion although I attended John Bapst only one year. ("Dave who?" some of you are saying.) I very likely will not make it to the gathering --- my wife Marilyn and I are both quite healthy, thanks, but there are other events that unfortunately will prevent us from being there. However I wanted to send my bio as an answer to the question, "Whatever happened to ... ?"

As some of you may remember, after my freshman year I left Bapst to study for the Xaverian Brothers, but decided in 1955 it was not the life for me.

By then many of you were half way through college and I was still trying to figure out what to do.

I took some courses at Husson, but the double-entry system overwhelmed my poetic mind. A year or so later the army threatened to draft me, so I enlisted in hopes of getting some schooling. It worked. The military sent me to Monterey to study Russian for a year at the Army Language School, and then to the East German border where I put on earphones and listened to intercepted Russian military communications for 18 months. After my discharge I went back to California, got a BA and MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State, and a teaching credential at U.C. Berkeley. Then I taught high school English and journalism for 18 years.

One day in 1964, I saw a young lady come out of a building in Menlo Park, California, on her way to do an errand, and instantly I had to meet her.

She was Marilyn Gough, who had moved to the Bay Area from Seattle. The following Friday we went on our first date, and two years later we were married. Eventually we had two children, Kathleen and Michael.

In 1979 I made a curious career decision. With two kids not that many years away from college and a tenured teaching position bringing in a modest but assured income, I became a freelance writer. A marketing writer, not the kind who writes fiction. (Although the cynics among you may think that marketing writers produce fiction.) For the next 20 years I had an adventurous time writing for some very good companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the Bay Area. I've published some other stuff over the years. A college professor put one of my short stories ("The Guy Who Owned the Pitcher's Mound") in an anthology that included fiction by Joyce, Thurber, Steinbeck, and Updike. My story is quite forgettable, but the table of contents I had framed.

In 1999 Marilyn and I retired, sold our home in Palo Alto, and moved to Laguna Woods, which is just inland from Laguna Beach and about 50 miles south of L.A. We are 15 minutes from the ocean and five minutes from my golf club. This month we celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary. Michael, who got a four-year taste of New England life as a student at RISD in Providence, is an art director in L.A., and he, his wife Laura, and their two sons live an hour north of us. Kathleen is a physical therapist, and lives with her husband Mike and their son in University Place, Washington, about a half-hour south of Seattle.

Last year I made another curious career decision --- I came out of retirement just a little bit to become an extra (the term of art these days is "background actor") in movies and TV. I've been in about a dozen productions so far, including "Seabiscuit," "Hollywood Homicide" (I'm the face-down stiff Harrison Ford investigates in the very last scene of the film), "The West Wing," "The Gilmore Girls," "The Guardian," and "The District." While working on last season's final episode of "The West Wing" (when the President's daughter is kidnapped) I really got the acting bug, so now I'm taking classes in hopes of making the jump from background actor to principal.

Since I wasn't going to attend the reunion, at first I thought I wouldn't write this narrative, but then I clicked on a bio on the home page, and a flood of memories came back. The bio was Norby Dowd's, now sadly deceased, one of several people I was most looking forward to seeing again when I thought I would be able to attend. When we were in our early teens, we both had crushes on Colleen Sullivan who is also long since deceased. In the summer of 1949 or 1950, Norby and I went to see her at a place her folks had at Green Lake. I was determined to impress her more than Norby did, so I said I would swim across the lake and back. Norby was steamed but said he would row along side, although I'm not all that sure it was for my safety.

I've also read all the other bios submitted thus far, and I want Jean Bell to know that after reading hers I made a contribution in her name to the Mississippi State Democratic Party.

My best to all.

Dave Riley