5-Term ‘General’ Savors Year of Victories : Orange County: A new airport wing, reelection and a huge new regional park cap Thomas F. Riley’s career of service.

Orange County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, now in the 79th year of an intensely public life, has known his share of busy times. But even by his standards, the past 12 months have come fast and furious.

The hectic pace began last summer when Riley, beaming with satisfaction and relief, finally threw open the doors of the county’s new Thomas F. Riley Terminal at John Wayne Airport. Over the succeeding months, he would win reelection to his fifth term, undergo open-heart surgery and help in the creation of the county’s biggest regional park. He would also support two controversial tax measures--one was approved, the other scorchingly defeated.

“This has been the red-letter year,” said Riley, a barrel-chested man with thick white hair and an easy, Irish grin. “As we look back, our family and friends, this will be the year that we’ll remember.”

But as Riley and his wife, Emma Jane, reflected during a recent wide-ranging interview at their Newport Beach home, they made it clear that 1990-91 does not stand alone. Their lives have mixed occasional moments of anguish, bushels of awards and military honors and more memories than either can count.

Tom Riley has tallied up a long list of admirers on his way to becoming Orange County’s senior statesman, but there are critics, too. Some fault aspects of his supervisorial tenure, while others quietly wonder whether his considerable health problems--he is noticeably more frail than a year ago--have hampered his effectiveness.

“I had a lady ask me today if I feel old,” he said last week. “I really don’t. I’m still the first person here in the morning, and I still enjoy my job.”

Tom and Emma Jane Riley tell their histories differently--he with the practiced reserve of a lifelong military officer and politician, she with mischievous candor. But they proudly show off their enduring marriage and their commitment to public service, even while admitting that it has not always been easy.

They weathered the disappointment of discovering that they could not have children. Emma Jane Riley, now 76, confronted and subdued her alcoholism.

Riley came of age during the Depression, climbed his way to the upper ranks of the Marine Corps and then, just when most men would be settling into retirement, accepted the call to become a county supervisor.

In recent years, Riley has battled a series of health problems. He suffers from asthma, diabetes and heart trouble, and for a while late last fall, his health seemed in precipitous decline.

Now, he said, he feels better than he has since the mid-1980s, though he sometimes appears to tire during long board meetings.

Along the way, Riley--known universally at the county Hall of Administration as “the General”--has made his share of enemies. Critics, many of whom would not allow their names to be used, say he has been too soft on developers and allowed South County to grow haphazardly, without the benefit of intelligent, long-term planning.

“He’s the best thing that developers could ever have on the board because he’s thoroughly honest,” said Tom Rogers, a San Juan Capistrano rancher who ran against Riley in 1978 and has dogged him ever since. “But his standards, when it comes to quality of life, are totally misplaced. He doesn’t have any grasp of land use.”

Riley also has a corps of stalwart supporters.

“He is so sincere, so honest, so hard-working,” said Ralph Clark, who was chairman of the Board of Supervisors when Riley joined it in 1974. “He was one of the best governmental appointments that’s ever been made, and he’s proved it again and again over the years.”

What’s perhaps most surprising about Riley’s 17-year tenure on the board, however, is that so little in his life seemed to have prepared him for it.

Catholic Upbringing

Born in Harrisonburg, Va., Tom Riley was reared by a strong-willed Roman Catholic mother and a father who worked for the railroad.

“That was the Depression,” Riley said. “The important thing was to have a job when you got through with school.”

He studied civil engineering at the Virginia Military Institute, where he also played football. And though his team was just average, Riley said he attracted a little attention from the first game he played.

In that contest, a bruising battle against the University of Richmond, Riley scored the winning touchdown, getting a tooth knocked out in the process. A newspaper photographer snapped a picture of him, helmet askew and grinning through his broken tooth. The accompanying headline, “Mugs Riley Scores Winning Touchdown,” earned him the nickname Mugs.

School and Marine friends call him that to this day.

Whether it was his gridiron play or his schoolwork, something caught the eye of the school superintendent, a Marine Corps general named John Lejeune who had previously served as commandant of the Corps. When the general held his traditional dinner on the final day of the football season, Riley was offered a place of honor.

“I was seated right there at the general’s right elbow,” Riley said. “They were serving oyster stew, and I had this spoonful almost to my lips when the general said: ‘How would you like to be a Marine?’ ”

Riley begged off, then rushed out to call home that night. His mother told him she disapproved. Marines were being shipped to engagements all over the world, and she feared for her son’s life.

But then his mother talked to her brother, Bud, himself a former Marine.

“He told her he’d rather be a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps than President of the United States,” Riley said. “She said that was a pretty good endorsement.”

The Marines took Riley far from Harrisonburg and far from civil engineering. And, as his mother feared, they took him to war.

He fought with distinction in the Pacific during World War II, winning an array of medals and honors as he climbed the promotion ladder.

Riley’s military career would eventually bring him to California, where he served for a time as chief of staff at Camp Pendleton. He left California to become inspector general of the Corps, but when it came time to retire he returned to the state.

He and Emma Jane completed their Back Bay home 1965, and he settled into a job with a local military contractor. She started her ambitious program of charitable work, helping out with a variety of hospital groups and other organizations.

Together, they modestly forged a place in Orange County, but they stayed at the edge of the limelight, not in its center.

Reagan Called

Then, on a Sunday in late August, 1974, Tom Riley was sitting on the back porch when the phone rang. It was Gov. Ronald Reagan calling to tap a retired brigadier general--one who had never run for public office--for a spot on the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

“I don’t think anyone could have found any people who knew less about local politics,” Emma Jane Riley said. “But I have heard that the Marines like hand-to-hand combat, and that’s local politics.”

Taking the job meant stepping into a difficult position at a time of mystery and tragedy. Supervisor Ronald W. Caspers, who had held the 5th District seat for years, had disappeared in a storm off Baja California. When the boat could not be found, he and the other passengers were declared dead.

Riley had followed the Caspers stories, of course, but never dreamed that they would affect him so directly.

“I was shocked,” Riley said. “I didn’t have any idea why the governor would be calling me. We talked for a couple of minutes. I asked him for 78 hours--meaning to say 72--to think about it. He thought 24 was a better number. We agreed on 24.”

Riley used his 24 hours to call three people: a retired Los Angeles congressman, the mayor of Newport Beach and a former president of the Irvine Co., Charles Thomas, whom Riley knew from Washington. They all encouraged Riley to take the job, and he accepted.

Riley plunged into the work, aided by chairman Clark, who set his staff up with the freshman supervisor and let him grill them on their jobs. One by one, Riley met with county officials at all levels, receiving briefings about the government.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Contentious board meetings, with angry constituents or staff members, were a new phenomenon for the General.

“Until I became a county supervisor, I thought everybody loved me,” he said. “In the Corps, I’d say something, and they’d say: ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Nobody argued.”

Little Change in Issues

It has now been 17 years since Riley walked into his first board meeting, and though much has changed, many of the issues remain pretty much the same. Development, the airport, parks and open space--all dogged the board in 1974, and all occupy Riley today.

He weathered a recall attempt in 1988 over his support for development, and he has occasionally feuded with colleagues. He’s even watched a few of his fellow board members get handed indictments. One of them, Riley’s close associate and former board Chairman Ralph Diedrich, ended up in prison.

Sometimes it has been discouraging, Riley conceded, having colleagues come and go, watching talent wasted in corruption.

But scandal has never touched Riley. He’s had plenty of people disagree with him. Some have accused him of being unfit to hold his office, but no one has ever seriously challenged Riley at the polls.

Still, his relationship with developers has drawn fire over the years. Starting with his phone call to Thomas even before he accepted the job, Riley has been quick to call developers his friends, to seek their advice and to support their projects.

“There seems to be something unholy about having a developer as a friend,” Riley said. “I don’t accept that. The most important thing to me is my integrity, and no one can challenge that.”

Few do. But many question whether his closeness to local developers has encouraged Riley to let down his guard when it comes to managing growth.

“Over the years, Tom Riley has been an increasingly strong ally of the development community,” said Larry Agran, the former mayor of Irvine. “It’s far too close, far too cozy. . . . We are not getting the watchful eye that the community deserves.”

Rogers is more blunt: “Riley has been a disaster for the South County. He has been the architect of the destruction of the 5th District.”

Critics say the road network in South County was badly managed. Few major roads run north to south, linking areas such as Mission Viejo or San Juan Capistrano to the northern parts of the county. As a result, they say, Interstate 5 has become South County’s only large artery, leaving it overburdened.

Likewise, some critics say Riley’s fondness for huge open-space areas--Caspers Wilderness Park or the newly created coastal greenbelt around Laguna Beach, both of which are in his district--has forced developers to increase the density of housing on the remaining land. That increases traffic and congestion.

Riley, however, calls his area the “Fabulous 5th District” and said its growth has made life better for its residents.

“It’s true I didn’t have any land-use experience when I came to the board,” he said. “But I think we’ve done great things with the Fabulous 5th.”

Met on Blind Date

Through the Marine Corps, World War II, retirement, private business and his latest career as a supervisor, Riley has stood arm in arm with his wife of 52 years.

They met on a blind date in Portland, Ore., in 1938. On the second night they had known each other, Riley sat transfixed while his wife-to-be sang for a group of people.

“She sang ‘Someday My Prince Will Come,’ and she looked right at me for the whole song,” Riley said during a moment while Emma, whom he calls Em, was out of the room. “I knew she was for me.”

They were married Sept. 29, 1938, despite her father’s reservations about giving away his daughter to a second lieutenant she had met barely three months earlier.

They tried to have children, but doctors told them it was medically impossible.

“That was a disappointment to us,” Riley said. “We would liked very much to have had children, but it just wasn’t in the cards. Others have benefitted, though. Em has spent that time helping other people, and I’ve been able to bring up the ‘county family.’ ”

For a time, the Rileys considered adopting, but they were advised not to by a base chaplain at Quantico Marine Corps Air Station in Virginia, who told them that children would be a problem for their mixed marriage (Tom Riley’s background is Roman Catholic, his wife’s is Presbyterian). Eventually, they dropped the adoption notion.

But even when adoption was no longer on their minds, Emma continued to hold an interest in Catholicism. Years later, while her husband was in Okinawa on assignment, she contacted a family friend, a Roman Catholic priest at Camp Pendleton. He taught her about the religion, and she was moved.

She studied and, without ever telling her husband, converted. Riley did not learn that his wife had converted until he arrived home from Okinawa in 1960 to find a wedding party waiting for him at the airport.

“I got off the plane, and there were all these people on the Tarmac,” he said, laughing along with his wife. “We went to the chapel and got married (again) before I even went home. I used to say I got married when I was a general in the Marine Corps.”

Emma thereafter devoted a large part of her life to her faith. She has received the highest papal honor that can be given a Catholic layperson: the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta.

But her Catholicism did not provide her the bulwark she needed to fight back from her growing alcohol dependency.

“I went to confession and said: ‘I had too many martinis last night,’ ” she said. The priest suggested Hail Marys, but “that didn’t help.”

Frantic that she would hurt her husband’s career if she kept up her drinking, Emma Jane Riley sought out Alcoholics Anonymous on Jan. 24, 1963, a date she remembers effortlessly. And after nearly three decades, she has never had another drink.

In 1975, Riley, worried about his own drinking and anxious to help his wife steer clear of alcohol, joined Emma Jane in sobriety.

Never has their marriage been more important than in the past decade, as Riley, once healthy as a horse, battled one ailment after another. Asthma was diagnosed about 1980, he said, and then diabetes.

Each of those conditions weakened him--an ex-smoker, he suffers from a thick, persistent cough--but his health seemed to take a turn for the worse late last year.

At a public hearing on the Santa Margarita Co.’s Las Flores project, Riley was so ill that he got sick several times during the meeting.

Typically, he would not leave.

“I felt that I should be there and vote on this if there was any way I could,” he said. “Down there, where the public can see me, is where I do my job.”

Not knowing why he was feeling ill, Riley went for several weeks without seeking help. He complained to his wife of a sharp pain in his chest that he would feel every night before going to sleep. But it lasted just a few minutes, and he ignored it.

Then, one night the pain went on for half an hour, and the Rileys decided that it was time for the General to be hospitalized. On New Year’s Eve, doctors performed a quadruple heart bypass.

From his hospital bed, Riley pledged to attend his swearing-in ceremony for his fifth term later that month. He almost did not make it. A problem with his medication left him unsteady on his feet and nauseated. But, with his wife planted firmly by his side, he took the oath, then was hustled back to the hospital.

Since then, he has been back in the saddle, attending meetings regularly, fighting back his staff’s attempts to get him to work half-days and showing up at meetings and dinners across the county, almost invariably with his wife.

They try, sometimes in vain, to attend fewer events than they used to. In other ways, Riley has also begun to adjust his routine in ways that betray his age: He drives less, and occasionally falters in conversations, struggling to remember details.

But Tom Riley, ever the Marine, still rises at the crack of dawn and is often the first person to arrive for work on the fifth floor of the Hall of Administration. He still works the crowd before many board meetings, shaking hands and kissing cheeks.

And even though the Rileys are approaching 80, neither seems inclined to wile away the time on the sunny back patio of their home.

“I was very sick for a while” last year, Tom Riley said. “But now I’m really feeling better than I have for the past four or five years. I’m still trying to take it easy--my staff is trying to get me to--but it feels great to be a supervisor. I love this job. I’m going to keep on doing it.”