Man of letters

Charles Reilly has strong opinions and isn’t shy about sharing them with the Los Angeles Time’s million readers

Charles Reilly is a man of letters, but not in the traditional sense of a man devoted to literary or scholarly pursuits. The successful corporate headhunter and dropout has had more than 100 letters published in the Los Angeles Times.

Reilly is the kind of guy you love – or hate – to meet at a bar or be seated next to at a dinner party He’s smarter than a Jeopardy! champ, more opinionated than Bill O’Reilly and more eager to share those opinions than Donald Trump.

An accomplished basketball player and deadeye three-point shooter, the 66-year-old Manhattan Beach resident has strong opinions on sports topics, like the recent four game suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady: “Deflategate is a witch hunt. At least Brady hasn’t punched his wife in the face or whipped his kid with hard objects, like some other players. They’re just out to crucify the guy.” (Full disclosure: Reilly is originally from New England and still retains a bit of a Boston Irish accent to prove it.)

A Vietnam War veteran who believes that government’s most important function is to protect its citizens, Reilly has strong opinions on political topics like next year’s presidential election:  “This country doesn’t need another Clinton or Bush as the next president. It’s time to move on from those two families and start fresh.  They’ve both worn out their welcome.” (Full disclosure: Reilly is a registered Democrat but votes the candidate, not the party.)

A classically trained pianist who adapted his 10 years of formal lessons to play with several jazz and rock bands and can still play note-for-note renditions of Hey Jude, Layla and dozens of other classic rock songs, Reilly also has strong opinions on the arts: “Led Zeppelin’s early critics were wrong about them, especially Rolling Stone, which used to rip them to shreds. They’re right up there with the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Their music has outlasted almost every one of their peers.”

Combining that full spectrum of opinions with a talent for writing – he’s penned two published novels in his spare time — has made Reilly a triple threat when it comes to getting letters published in the LA Times.

He recently had his 101st letter appear in the Times. About a third of them have been on the op-ed page, about a third in the Saturday sports section – the only day the sports section prints letters – and about a third in the Sunday Calendar section.

Times Letters Editor Paul Thorton  said Reilly may well be the century old newspaper’s most prolific letter writer of all time.

“If he’s not the champ, then he’s right up there on the podium,” Thornton said.

Thornton, who handles the letters for the Op-Ed page but not the Sports or Calendar sections, says he gets over a thousand letters a week.

“I whittle them down to a pool of 500 to 700 that are under consideration for printing,” he says. “I’m confident these letters are written by who they say they are. Then I run between 10-15 of them six days a week.”

Though Reilly is one of the few who gets letters published regularly, Thornton says he is not the most prolific letter writer around — just one of the most published.

“There are a lot of people who make a hobby of letter writing,” he says. “There’s one guy who sends me five or six letters a day.”

A scrappy kind of guy    

A few years ago Reilly and some friends were drinking at his favorite hangout, Pancho’s Restaurant in downtown Manhattan Beach. Instead of the usual topics of local pro sports, national politics or great women they’ve known and loved, Reilly brought up Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

One guy in the group said Reilly was wrong and insisted the title was actually The Portrait of Dorian Gray. He bet $100 that he was right.

“That was the easiest money I ever made,” Reilly recalled. “His money paid for my drinks the rest of the night.”

That incident was typical for Reilly, a street type of guy with an intellectual edge and a huge reservoir of facts and figures at his fingertips.

“He’s a scrappy kind of guy, although he’s calmed down now in his old age,” says Jack Lyons, a Rancho Palos Verdes resident who befriended Reilly at Pancho’s back in the 1980s when they were the only ones rooting for the Boston Celtics when the Celtics played the LA Lakers in three NBA Finals. “I’m sure he has been wrong about something in the past, but I can’t think of any times that actually happened.”

Kevin Hannon, another old friend, says Reilly is missing out on national exposure because he won’t take his talents to TV.

“I’ve told him many times he should try out for “Jeopardy!” because he has an encyclopedia for a brain,” says Hannon. “He could make a lot of money and become well known like that Ken Jennings guy who did so well a few years ago.”

But Reilly insists he has no plans to audition for “Jeopardy!” or any other quiz show.

“It’s just not my style,” he says. “I prefer to make a bet or write a letter to the editor. It’s less stressful.”

Times tips

Getting a letter published in the Times isn’t easy. Reilly admits even he is only batting around 40  percent. But that is an incredible, beat-the-odds success rate compared to most letter writers who never see their letters printed.  For those who wonder how he does it he has a few useful tips.

First, the letter should respond to a specific news article or editorial in a recent edition of the paper.

“Don’t just send in a rant about something that’s bugging you and don’t send in a letter accusing them of being a bunch of liberal or conservative idiots,” he says. “Those letters never get published.”

His second tip is equally basic: write a good, logical argument.

“Make sure you have valid reasons for your point of view and make sure your references are 100 percent accurate, like if you use quotes from famous people,” he says. “Do your homework or you will lose credibility with the editors.”

Third tip: be succinct.

“Keep it down to 100 or 150 words,” he says. “Even if they do print it, they will edit your letter if it’s too long.”

Finally, and this he admits is a matter of personal preference that might not apply to everyone, he doesn’t write letters criticizing people or teams when they are down and out.

After the LA Clippers blew their 3-1 series lead over the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Semifinals and squandered a 19-point lead in Game 6, talk radio was ablaze with accusations that the Clippers were all chokers, star point guard Chris Paul would never make it past the second round of the playoffs, and the Clippers Curse was still alive despite the involuntary departure of racist, tight-wad owner Donald Sterling in favor of excitable, high-tech billionaire Steve Ballmer.

Predictably, the Times’ Saturday sports section following the Clippers collapse did have several letter writers making those very points. But Reilly was not among them.

“There’s no need to kick the Clippers when they’re down,” he says.  “They’re kicking themselves right now. They don’t need me to pile on.”

He did make one exception to that policy years ago, when Dodgers infielder Jeff Kent was annoying fans and sportswriters with his arrogant, selfish behavior and gloomy disposition.

“I wrote that Jeff Kent could throw a wet blanket over an entire locker room,” he recalled with a chuckle. “Of course the Times printed it the one time I broke my own rule.”

Go west young man

Reilly learned to identify with the underdog, growing up on the mean streets of  East Providence, Rhode Island, which has also produced former Dodgers infielder Davey Lopes and bombastic Fox News TV personality Elizabeth Hasselbeck.

He graduated from the prestigious LaSalle Academy in 1967 after getting straight A’s in composition. But he soon dropped out of Rhode Island Junior College and was drafted in 1969. He attended Airborne training and Ranger School, then was shipped off to Vietnam where he served with a Ranger company affiliated with the 101st Airborne.

Naturally, he has a strong opinion about service to the country.

“For the defense of this country, every young person should serve in the armed forces or the Peace Corps or something like it and should donate at least a year to their country,” he says.

After spending 10 months and 23 days in Vietnam, Reilly returned to New England with one goal:  to distance himself from his military service.

“I did what everyone else did, tried to get on with my life and put it behind me,” he says.

But after attending a reunion of Vietnam vets in 1986 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Reilly began to see his military service in a new light.

“I think now people appreciate the Vietnam vets more than they did in 1970,” he says. “They understand that we’re not the bad guys we were portrayed to be back then.”

That hard-won perspective gave him a better understanding of a soldier’s role in the bigger national security picture.

“Everyone knows the Iraq War was a mistake,” he says. “The Iraq War vets fought and suffered like us but this time they were  welcomed back. A  soldier doesn’t get to pick the war they’re in. He or she has to hope and pray the government makes the right decisions.”

During the 1970s Reilly played piano in several bands, got married and was elected a union representative for a steelworkers union. In 1980 he got divorced and and like so many before him, headed west to start fresh.

He washed up in Manhattan Beach in 1980, left for Orange County in 1992 and moved back to Manhattan in 2000, where he now lives with his second wife Ilene Pendleton and stepdaughter Sara Pendleton. During that time he re-invented himself as an executive recruiter and currently works as a corporate headhunter for an IT firm called TIG.

Opening the floodgates

Reilly’s first letter to the editor was prompted by a cartoon he saw in the Orange County Register after John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane he was flying to a family gathering on Cape Cod in July 1999.  The cartoon made JFK Jr. look stupid for going on that flight and it was accompanied by an editorial criticizing President Clinton for letting the Coast Guard assist in the search for the plane’s wreckage.

“I wrote them that JFK Jr. would be remembered long after the cartoonist and his cartoons had been washed away by history,” Reilly said.

Seeing his first letter to the editor printed by a large newspaper opened the floodgates for Reilly. Soon afterwards, he read an editorial in the Times arguing that Pope Pius 12th had not done enough to help the Jews during World War 2 and that his inaction may have contributed to the holocaust.

Reilly, a life-long Catholic, sent off a passionate rebuttal, arguing that the church was not responsible for the Holocaust, the Germans were. Period.

Since then he has written about a multitude of topics, sometimes praising people whose obits were just published, like the eternal teenager, Dick Clark. Clark, he wrote, was not usually regarded as a racial pioneer but deserved credit for advancing race relations by insisting that black artists be given prominent spots on American Bandstand even before the civil rights movement of the 1960’s.

He has also weighed in on showbiz topics like the Sony email hacking scandal last year: “If you have something bad to say about someone say it to their face, don’t email it where it can be hacked.”

He couldn’t resist a sarcastic needle that captured the public’s mood when Jamie McCourt sued seeking even more money from her former husband Frank’s sale of the Dodgers back in 2012:  “I guess Jamie McCourt feels suckered into accepting the mere sum of $131 million,” he wrote. “There’s sure to be a judge who’s sympathetic to this poor lady and can help her maintain the lifestyle she so richly deserves — very richly indeed.”

But nothing gets him headed to his computer like public officials who steal taxpayer money and the judges who let them off lightly.

“When someone breaks into your house and steals from you, he’s only stealing from you,” he says. “But when a public official steals, it’s stealing from everybody, so betraying the public trust should be treated far more harshly than a common criminal. I don’t like it when politicians get slapped on the wrist.”

He doesn’t have much sympathy for those pushing for more stringent gun controls: “When someone is breaking into your house, a gun in the hand is worth more than a cop on the phone.”

Having his name and adopted hometown printed so prominently has given Reilly a certain cachet with people who read the Times regularly.

“My wife Ilene is the office manager of a dental office on Hollywood Boulevard and when my name pops up, people ask if that’s the guy with all the letters in the Times,” he says. “It was never my intent, but all those letters have given me an identity separate from my work world. I’m thankful to the Times for printing so many.”

While Reilly is quick to share his opinions with the public via the Times, his friends say some of his most profound opinions have been uttered in private.

“I remember one night when we were drinking in Pancho’s and he said that we need to get girlfriends to save ourselves from ourselves,” Lyons said. “Shortly after that I got married and then he got married. He’s said some really smart things in those letters he writes. But that was the smartest thing he ever said.”

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