Joseph Riley knows who to thank for his success in life. The mentors who took him in along the way; the Boston-area schools that gave him the gift of education; himself, for all of his own hard work – yes, all of these – but mostly, it’s his mother, Marie Riley, and an unknown man who used to be a line boss at the Polaroid factory.
Riley, now executive vice president of consumer banking at Eastern Bank, grew up as an only child raised by a single mother in Dorchester in the 1970s. His mother, a native of Newfoundland with a ninth-grade education who worked assembly lines and cleaned office buildings, knew that one thing was of the utmost importance for her child: an education. So on her meager salary, she sent her son to parochial elementary schools, to Catholic Memorial High School, to The College of the Holy Cross and Northeastern University.
His youth gave him “a perspective about what people who work very hard, and have very big dreams, can accomplish with the right work ethic and help along the way,” he said.
To illustrate what a difference “help along the way” can mean, Riley recounts a story from 1974, when he was entering his junior year at Catholic Memorial. Tuition at the time was $750, and his mother owed half of it – with no way to pay. And so, sadly, the administration said Riley would be unable to attend that year.
Distraught, but taciturn, his mother returned to the assembly line at Polaroid, where her boss noticed something was wrong with one of his hardest workers. He pulled her into his office and asked what was wrong. When the story came out, the man called the Polaroid employee credit union, secured a loan, and sent Riley to school. In 1976, Riley was valedictorian of his graduating class at CM.
“I don’t know who that man was, but he’s an angel,” he said. “Sometimes people need help, and they need people to be interested in helping them, to achieve their goals and dreams.”
After graduating from Northeastern, Riley took a brief turn at being a CPA, saying that he was “pretty good with numbers and gravitated to something in business, but I quickly found that being able to do something and wanting to do it is very different.” From there he moved into finance with a commercial bank for about five years. In 1994, he was invited to run the retail franchise at Eastern Bank, and considers himself “very fortunate and lucky to have come here.”
“In consumer banking, working with small businesses, we can provide the means to help people achieve their hopes and dreams, by providing a little help along the way,” he said. “That’s the role we in the financial industry can play, and be pretty proud of.”
