Amherst Magazine Edward M. Salley ’38

Deceased September 15, 2011
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Edward M. "Ed" Salley Jr.

With Ed’s death, our class notes will never be the same.

Always beating the deadline, Ed’s scribble would arrive to brighten the seasonal chronicle. He gloried in life’s absurdities and loved to puncture perceived pomposities.

The current Amherst logo, “Lives of Consequence,” for example, irked him. By contrast, he endorsed Prof. Charles Cole saying long ago that “one didn’t go to Amherst to learn a job or livelihood but to learn how to live your life.”

Ed brought a Catch 22 approach to his WWII memories. As a 90-day-wonder torpedo officer on a destroyer in the Pacific, he had to bear with Annapolis men who countermanded his orders. He quoted one as telling him, "The Navy way is everything at full speed, even if it’s screwed up.”

And when his law firm honored him with a plaque, he told us, “Honors, no cash, that’s what emeritus means.”

In recent years, Ed joked about his constant round of doctors’ appointments. Ironically, it was one of these that did him in. His son, Edward III, said he fell down the stairs leaving a doctor’s office and did not recover from his injuries, dying Sept. 15, 2011, at 95.

Ed took constant care of his ailing wife, Mary Sherrill, and she died only three weeks after him. Their son and two grandchildren survive.

Born in Jersey City, N.J., Ed graduated from St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark. At Amherst he majored in German and economics, lettered in soccer and was also on the wrestling squad. He got his law degree from New York University in 1942.

As a partner with Montfort, Healy, McGuire and Salley in Mineola, Long Island, Ed’s trial assignments took him from Riverhead to courts in New York City and Westchester County.

George Bria ’38