Rita Catherine Reilly Hall Was Somebody Special

The Boston Herald

"Everybody wants to be somebody," Sharon Randall wrote in The Monterey Herald, quoting a guy who stuffed nine rattlesnakes in his mouth to break a world record. "I'm doing it for the prestige, the glory and the attention."

Then she told about how her mother wanted to be a famous singer. And I thought about how my mother wanted to be a famous singer. And she wrote about her own youthful dreams. And I thought about mine.

Everybody wants to be somebody, to stand out. But mostly we blend in, don't we? We live our lives, raise our families, do our jobs and we don't make headlines. And yet we are, each of us, somebody.

I never knew Rita Catherine Reilly, never even knew her name until a few days ago when her youngest son, Jay Hall, who lives in Plymouth, e-mailed me. Rita Catherine Reilly was HIS somebody, an amazing somebody who lived a good and decent life and raised good and decent kids, not for glory, but because she knew no other way.

She was a fighter and a survivor. She was born in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1929. She was 3 years old when she contracted polio, along with her brother Frank. Back then it was as dreaded as the Black Plague. No one knew where it came from or how it was spread. The two children were whisked away to an institution where they were cared for and raised by priests and nuns.

It must have been a hard, lonely life for Rita and her brother. It must have been even harder to come home, finally, as teenagers, braces on their legs and strangers to the rest of the family. "Neither was able to fit back into the family that had let them go as small children," Hall writes.

Frank, the brother, did what guys generally do. He lost himself in his work. And Rita did what most girls did in those days. She got married. Rita became Mrs. William Hall.

Like a lot of young couples, they lived paycheck to paycheck. Then one day Bill Hall left, and Rita ended up raising five girls and three boys in the Maverick projects of East Boston.

"We were a tough little bunch." Hall writes. And Rita Hall was the toughest of all. She worked every day, put food on the table, taught her children right from wrong. She never let circumstances defeat her.

"Sometimes someone would ask me, 'Hey? Why does your mother walk like that?' And my response would be, 'Like what?' " She wore a brace on her leg her entire life. But she never let it slow her down. "Her never-say-quit attitude and toughness inspired us all.” 

The children grew up and one by one moved out of the projects. "Come live with us," they said. But Rita said, "No, you go. Just bring my grandchildren to visit me.”

I bet she never imagined that in her twilight years she'd get her own home. I bet she never dreamed when she was struggling to walk and to fit in, when she was stretching food and dollars that one day her children would do what they did. They bought her a three-family house. Jay and a sister "saved and saved." And all the brothers and sisters helped out. "They gave us the extra money we needed or just lent a hand to get the place together for Ma. She was ecstatic. Finally, she had her own place.” 

She lived there for just six months before she died. But they were a good six months. "We were truly a family, maybe not the conventional American idea of a family but we were the tightest and most loving bunch" Hall says, adding that they still are. "We're spread out a little but Ma will be at all our Thanksgiving tables.”

Everybody wants to be somebody important. Rita Catherine Reilly Hall was.