Landing coveted bio gig, P&C columnist goes toe to toe with Mayor Joe
Good fortune does not always coincide with good timing, even when that stroke of luck is matched with merit. But when you have the good fortune of being invited to pen the authorized biography of the man known as “America’s mayor,” you are willing to take do-able timing over that which is truly good.
And so, on December 10 at a special meet-the-author event at Halls Chophouse, award-winning Post and Courier journalist Brian Hicks introduced the finished product of his leap of faith (and race against the clock): “The Mayor: Joe Riley and the Rise of Charleston.”
Hicks opened by praising the event’s host for the outstanding lunch. “For the past year, I’ve been eating with Joe Riley… at Subway,” he deadpanned. “I believe the mayor and I have eaten at every Subway franchise in the metropolitan and Columbia areas since January.” Riley’s staff had warned Hicks that the mayor was a creature of habit. He had apparently gone nearly unbroken with lunches at The Colony House until the decades-old restaurant closed in the early 90s.
When initially approached about writing the biography, Hicks almost declined the offer. He was invited to the project in late October 2014, and was told the team wanted the book out before Riley left office at the end of 2015. That gave just over a year to store shelves, and production time alone averages about nine months. “So, that was my excuse,” Hicks stated, “I said there wasn’t going to be enough time.” (As it turns out, by word count “The Mayor” is longer than any of the previous seven books he’s authored.)
But Hicks concedes that his hesitation was less about the time constraints than it was about the subject matter. Hicks had done a story with the mayor within the journalist’s first couple of weeks in Charleston and, from the start of their working relationship, had always found him to be pleasant and forthcoming. But Joe Riley had always been very private about his personal life, a habit that was understandably concerning for the person doing the chronicling. Though Hicks had earned the privilege of contacting the mayor on his unpublished line for an “unvarnished” opinion on many matters, he was unsure that the mayor would be willing to go truly on-the-record for a meaningful biography. But apparently the mayor trusted Hicks and perceived their relationship as a well-founded, trusted one, because he gave the nod to the veteran political columnist after turning down offers from six other author hopefuls.
After a week’s deliberation, Hicks decided to take the gig. What really sealed the deal was this: Hicks had learned from those close to Mayor Riley that after his first inauguration, the new holder of the City Hall keys and some of his buddies capped off the celebration with some late-night beer and cigars in the mayor’s office. Hicks knew the mayor’s reaction to this bit of dish would be indicative of just how open his bio subject would be in divulging stories and information. To Hicks’ delight, when he approached Joe Riley, they mayor sputtered out, “Oh, that ain’t all… we re-arranged all the furniture…” Said Hicks, “That’s when I realized, there was going to be nothing off-limits for the book.” He went further to state that, in the year of interviews, not once did the mayor refuse to answer a question or request that the author not include material in the manuscript.
At the onset of the project, Hicks dug into the P&C archives, and found that between 1975 and the fall of 2014, Mayor Joe Riley appeared in 20,000 of the paper’s stories. The biographer read each one, and created a timeline with all the most notable headlines. It turned out to be 120 pages long. When he told the mayor about that four-decade outline, Riley responded, “I’d like to borrow that sometime.” From the time writing on “The Mayor” commenced last December, Hicks was at his laptop from 9 a.m. to midnight seven days a week. And he was still working on his P&C column all the while.
Early on, Hicks pitched his approach to Riley like this: the book would be a biography, but it would really read as a modern history of Charleston, with Mayor Joe as the main character. “Make no mistake,” Hicks told the crowd at Halls, “in the history of Charleston over the last 40 years, Joe Riley has been the main character.” He focused on the mayor’s efforts at racial equality and social justice, and the revitalization of Charleston, recalling that those were the reasons he ran for the post in the first place.
Hicks also underscored the mayor’s propensity to get on something, and stick with it. He “got on” Charleston Place a year after taking office, and ten years later the centerpoint hotel would open. He grabbed onto Waterfront Park, an idea he had in 1976 that did not come to fruition until 1990. He had the notion of building the South Carolina Aquarium in 1982, and at the turn of the century the doors finally opened. And the first mention of the African-American Museum, which the mayor is still working on today, came in 2000. “It’s the same pattern with everything he does,” the author attests. “He doesn’t give up. He’s tenacious.”
As the P&C’s metro columnist, Hicks had spent a fair amount of time with Joseph P. Riley since joining the news outlet in 2007, establishing a strong rapport with Charleston’s mayor. Hicks had, in fact, logged hours with a multitude of local and state politicians over those years. “I work with politicians every single day; it’s pretty much what I do,” he asserted. “Some of them I like a great deal; I consider some of them friends. And there’s a lot of them I don’t trust further than I could throw them. The mayor has always kind of been at a different level from all of those people.”
Hicks claims that the distinction is Riley’s near-universal ability to command respect, simply by virtue of who he is and what he has stood for and accomplished. Still, Hicks contends that as much as he respects the mayor, he hasn’t always agreed with him. “I’ve written columns against things that he’s said… and I’ve heard from him every single time,” the author related. “That’s Joe Riley’s standard operating procedure, the three-page, single-spaced letter, telling you why you’re wrong and he’s right.” It apparently has been the mayor’s modus operandi for at least 40 years; he argues that he’s right, he tells you why he’s right, he makes his case, and he states it over and over until the opposition just gives up. Observed Hicks, “That’s how Charleston was built.”