You guys are close, but most are wrong.
O'Reilly graduated from Chaminade High School in Long Island in 1967, a year in which 10,000 Americans, some younger then O'Reilly, died in Vietnam. And in these years, 1967-1968, O'Reilly would have to register for the draft and then make a decision. While America's lower economic classes were being drafted or enlisting there was a ways out for many of the despised liberal elite. It was called the college deferment followed by graduate school.
Yet O'Reilly, at his age and single, was high priority draftee material yet never enlisted or was drafted and his record of the Vietnam era remains blank. Today's - but not yesterday's - super patriot, entered Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York in the fall of 1967. He was active as a columnist for the student newspaper The Circle as well as a member of the football team which meant he suffered no great physical handicap which would exempt him from military service.
O'Reilly spent his junior year, 1969-1970 at the University of London.
Then, in the fall of 1970, he returned to Marist College from England, rejoined the football team and graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. In that year, 1971, American deaths in Vietnam passed the forty-five thousand marker.
Additionally, at the time of O'Reilly's graduation, a draft extension bill was passed along with what was then known as the Mansfield Amendment which set a national policy of withdrawing troops from Vietnam 9 months after the bill's enactment (wording was later softened to the "earliest practical date"). It was the first time in modern US history that Congress had urged an end to a war in which the country was actively involved
Yet after graduation, and with the conscription law and the draft lottery in full force, O'Reilly would never be inducted. Instead, he was off to Florida where he took a job teaching at a high school. Two years later, in 1973, he was back in college at Boston University for a master's degree in broadcast journalism. By that time he finished at Boston U., the draft and the war were history. And neither would ever play any part in the life of one of America's most vocal defenders of patriotic ways and values.
O'Reilly makes much of his "working class" upbringing in Levittown, Long Island. His book's dust-jacket bio begins: "Bill O'Reilly rose from humble beginnings to become a nationally known broadcast journalist," and O'Reilly says his father, who retired in 1978, "never earned more than $35,000 a year in his life."
On July 9, O'Reilly harshly criticized his guest James Wolcott for repeating in a Vanity Fair article the claim that O'Reilly's father made $35,000 in the 60's. O'Reilly stated that his father's salary had "topped out at $35,000 in 1980, when he took a disability settlement after 30 years at the company." O'Reilly was so proud of his performance that he posted a transcript on his show's web site.
O'Reilly practically fetishizes his "working-class background." He grew up, he often says, in Levittown, N.Y., the famed postwar tract suburb on Long Island. He recalls a childhood of secondhand cars, a small home with one bathroom, summer vacations to Miami aboard a Greyhound bus, a father "who never earned more than $35,000 a year in his life." He frequently tells the story of how, in high school, the better-off kids scorned him for his "two sports coats," bought at the unfashionable Modell's. Even today, O'Reilly says, he drives a used car.
Time out Bill. Let's try that "no spin" thing out here.
"Working class" is formally defined as follows:
The socioeconomic class consisting of people who work for wages, especially low wages, including unskilled and semiskilled laborers and their families. " The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition."
BTW, an Oil Company accountant is NOT working class. His father was an accountant for an oil company.
O'Reilly actually grew up in Westbury, Long Island, according to his mother Angela, who still lives in the Levitt-built house Bill grew up in. Westbury Long Island is a "middle-class suburb a few miles from Levittown," where he attended a private school (Washington Post, 12/13/00). His late father, William O'Reilly Sr., was a currency accountant with Caltex, an oil company; Angela "Ann" O'Reilly was a homemaker who also worked as a physical therapist.
While hardly well off, the O'Reillys - Mom, Dad, Bill Jr. and his younger sister, Janet - weren't exactly deprived, either. Both children attended private school, and the family sent Bill to Marist College, a private college in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., as well as the University of London for a year, without financial aid btw.
O'Reilly's father was a frugal man and a wise investor. His son acknowledges in his book that his father bequeathed "a very nice chunk of change" to his mother upon his death in 1986. As for Dad never earning more than $35,000, what O'Reilly doesn't mention is that Dad retired in 1978, when a $35,000 income was the equivalent of $92,000 in today's dollars.
That would put his dad in the top 10% of income earners in 1980. That is not working class !
Want Proof - look up what a $35,000 income in 1978 is worth in todays dollars -
whats a dollar worth:
http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/economy/calc/cpihome.htmllook up what the what the median income was in 1978:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f05.html
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