Not long ago, Kelle Flem reposted a 2018 Facebook exchange with Thomas Rogers Riley. She was once a student of Tom’s – who retired from teaching English at St. Joseph-Notre Dame High School in Alameda, Calif. – and after she graduated, Tom did what he did routinely:
He was always around when his students needed him, though in this case her problem involved words and ink.
“Hi, Mr. Riley need your help with an English question I struggle with,” Flem wrote. “I want this sentence in a tattoo but is this the correct way: ‘I believe I can; so I will.’ Or is it: ‘I believe I can, so I will.’ ”
Tom loved tattoos. He responded with confidence: “Comma, not a semicolon, which breaks up what is a single thought.”
Good advice, in all ways, as I write this column.
The first time I remember meeting Tom was at his mother’s wake, maybe 54 years ago, when we were 10 or 11. We both came from large families, and many of our older siblings overlapped. I think my mother – who had lost her own mom when she was 3 – had a hunch of what might happen when she brought me to that funeral home:
Tom walked toward me, within that crowd of quiet grown-ups, and boom. We were friends.
The Rileys lived in a house big enough for eight kids, on Central Avenue in Dunkirk. From sixth grade at St. Mary’s School until we graduated from the now-closed Cardinal Mindszenty High School, I’d knock on his door and we’d walk to school together almost every day – which I figure is somewhere around 1,260 times.
Multiply that by endless two-kid games of “21” at a lonely basketball court in the shadow of the steel plant – years later, as yearbook editors, we would have our picture taken beneath the smokestacks, as a core symbol of Dunkirk – or playing home run derby with a wiffle ball in the backyard, or just sitting on a stoop and drinking pop, outside a corner store.
Tom was legendarily funny, a classroom master of one-liners, though…
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