Dennis L. Riley1945 - 2023
A New Jersey attorney and state legislator who took his degree at Xavier, and spent forty years raising money for the ARC of Camden County.
Dennis L. Riley was born in Ottawa, Illinois, on 13 September 1945, to Giles and Rita Riley. While he was still a small boy the family moved to Collingswood, New Jersey, and he went to school at Bishop Eustace Preparatory. He came to Cincinnati for his undergraduate degree at Xavier, then went home to New Jersey and took his law degree at Rutgers School of Law in Camden in 1972.
He practiced law in Camden County for the rest of his working life. He represented planning, zoning and rent control boards, served as municipal prosecutor for Chesilhurst, Clementon, Lindenwold and Winslow Township, and was appointed to the planning board in Gloucester Township, where he lived.
In 1979, with the support of James Florio, he ran for a seat in the New Jersey General Assembly and won it. He held it until 1990. He wrote the legislation that brought two-dollar bets to the casinos, and the law that gave volunteer coaches and officials in Little League and other youth sports immunity from being sued. That second one is a small law about ordinary people giving up their Saturdays, and it is a good thing to be remembered by.
Golf was the great pleasure of his life. He organized trips for his friends, to Ireland and to Casa de Campo. In 2000 he became a partner in Valleybrook Golf Course and spent the next twenty-three years improving it into a course South Jersey golfers were glad of, and he kept a pub there, Riley's, where he made a great many friends.
He was always willing to help somebody who needed it. For forty years he ran the Riley/Kennedy Golf Tournament for the ARC of Camden County, which raised well over a million and a half dollars in that time. He endowed a golf scholarship for students at Xavier, and he had a hand in building the golf facility at Maketewah. Dennis Riley died on 24 May 2023. He was seventy-seven.
His family asked that anybody wishing to mark his death send a donation, in his name, to the ARC of Camden County.
Where this comes from, and what it leaves out
Every word of this is taken from the obituary his family published, in the Courier-Post, in May 2023. Nothing here comes from anywhere else.
That obituary also names the people he left behind. This page does not, and will not. A notice of survivors is written by a family for a family, and repeating it is not ours to do. What a college board can properly set down is where a man studied, what he did with his working life, and what other people saw him do.
It says he earned his undergraduate degree at Xavier. It does not say what he read or which years he was here, so this page does not say either. If you knew him and can fill any of that in, we would be glad to be told — and if anything here is wrong, tell a moderator and it will be put right.