Michael Riley, Asbury Park Press columnist loved for insight, irreverent humor, dies at 65

Michael Riley, a columnist and editorial writer for the Asbury Park Press who wrote about virtue and vice through his lens as a pastor, died on Monday of heart failure. He was 65.

Riley built a legion of fans with a humorous, accessible writing style, using lessons from the Bible, literature and popular culture, to explain the joys and pains of every day life.

His column was aptly named, "Only Human." No topic was off limits, his family life included. And he skillfully walked a fine line; in each column he wrote, he risked offending everyone. But when the angry calls came, he could defuse the tension with ease.

Once, Rabbi Donald Weber said, Riley compared the Via Dolorosa, the painful path Jesus walked through the Old City of Jerusalem to his crucifixion, to driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.

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"He would describe the ordinary and turn it to sanctity," said Weber, who invited Riley to speak to his own congregation at the former Temple Rodeph Torah in Marlboro. "And he didn't do in a way that you had to be his religion or his belief to see it. In the way he talked about a child's blanket, the way he talked about a love between two people, he would take the most ordinary human things and then see the light of God in them. To me, that's what he was."

Riley spoke of life's hardships through experience. He was born in Camden to Judy Chute and Robert Holohan and was adopted by his maternal grandmother, Florence Riley, and her second husband, Charles Riley. Mike Riley pointed out the relationship made him his own uncle.

Riley in columns said he grew up in a trailer park and described his grandmother — the only woman he called "mom" — as "prickly, quirky, or in the words of my wife, 'a little bit nuts.'"

Rather than turn bitter, though, he forged his own path. He read voraciously. He studied the Civil Rights Movement. He listened to comedy albums. And he tucked the information away into a bag, ready to deploy whenever he wanted to make a point or defend himself.

"Something clicked in him when he was growing up that there was more (to life) than following the road," his wife, Susan, said. "You had to find different ways of going that push the envelope of what life was."

Riley met Susan at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, where he studied philosophy and religion and managed to convince her to go out with him despite warnings from classmates to be prepared for him to hold court.

An ordained Baptist minister, Riley launched his journalism career in the mid-1980s, when he was leading a church in Medford, Massachusetts, and followed through on advice he read in a book about how to write for a newspaper: Find what the newspaper doesn't have and offer to write it. He started a religion column for the Medford Daily Mercury.

The Rileys returned to New Jersey three years later, where Mike joined the Stelton Baptist Church in Edison and began writing a column, eventually finding a home as a full-time journalist. His columns ran in the Home News Tribune and Asbury Park Press from 1990 until his retirement in 2015.

When the Press first ran his columns in 1996, the reaction was mixed, editors wrote. Readers might have expected more high-brow commentary from a clergyman than, say, why there were no chaplains aboard the starships in "Star Trek."

"I write that way to make readers see things they have not seen before," Riley said in his defense.

Riley embraced humanity's imperfections, writing about the struggles of marriage or raising four sons or coming to terms with a difficult childhood. The pain and frustration was made easier with humor. He smoked, drank soda and had tattoos. He chatted up strangers in line at grocery stores. He thought up one-liners to tell his co-workers throughout the day. He was a human water cooler break, at one point prompting co-workers to print out coupons they could present to him to get out of one Mike Riley conversation. When he retired, he asked for a roast.

Riley wrote with a liberal perspective for a largely conservative readership, occasionally sparking backlash. But his editors usually let him run with it.

"I could have said, you know, 'Mike, please tone it down,'" said Hollis Towns, the former executive editor at the Asbury Park Press. "But that's what columnists do. His point was to get your attention, to make you read, and that's what Mike did. He would write something provocative. And whether you agreed with it or not, he was going to elicit a reaction. Oftentimes, they were not necessarily positive ones, but you got a reaction. As the old saying goes, it's better to be relevant and responded to than ignored, and so Mike understood that with a fury, with a passion."

In addition to Susan, Riley is survived by sons Joshua, Christopher, Alexander and Samuel.

If Riley was looking for approval, he found it from one of his idols, Bruce Springsteen, an (by Riley's account) Asbury Park Press reader who (by Riley's account) met with Riley backstage after a concert and (by Riley's account) told him his columns were both smart and funny.

But Riley had proof that it happened. He kept close a picture from that night that he had taken with Joshua and Springsteen, ready to show friends and strangers alike at a moment's notice.

"I don't think there's a single conversation I've ever had with my dad or saw him have with someone else where, you know, he didn't end the conversation until somebody learned something from him," Joshua Riley said. "And I think he's just a teacher at heart. I think that's what it was, that he wanted to teach. And so everybody had to learn something from him."

Riley, who had a heart attack in 2001, was diagnosed with advanced chronic heart failure in 2021, when he decided to undergo a procedure for a heart pump at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune.

But it wasn't an easy choice. He was worn down and thought maybe it was time to call it quits and opt for palliative care.

“'I've had a good run,'” I said to Susan," Riley wrote in the Asbury Park Press. "We have loved each other fiercely, and brought four fine sons into this world. Bruce Springsteen has told me I'm smart and funny. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel asked me to opine on southern writer Flannery O'Conner in a Boston class he was teaching about the literature of cruelty. I've made people laugh. And think. It's time Elvis left the building and I shuffle off this mortal coil."

His memorial service is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 16 at First Presbyterian Church of Matawan. According to his obituary, which says, "Mike asked that we put the 'fun' in funeral," anyone who wishes to share what Riley meant to them may speak during the service.

Michael L. Diamond is a business reporter who has been writing about the New Jersey economy and health care industry for more than 20 years. He can be reached at mdiamond@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Michael Riley, retired Asbury Park Press columnist, dies at 65