Perhaps he was a typical American mayor, but in 1945 Riley was charged by the influential City Club of Portland with negligence in stamping out vice and corruption.

According to historian E. Kimbark MacColl, Riley had a secret vault in his City Hall office to store his percentage of vice protection payments.

Despite denials of laxness in his administration, Riley lost his third mayoral campaign to the reformer Dorothy McCullough Lee.

After the war, Portland Mayor Earl Riley openly declared the city could absorb only a minimum of Negros without upsetting its regular life.

He met his future wife, E. Fay Wade, while the two were attending Oregon State College, and they married on March 25, 1920.

After her husband's death, Fay Riley moved to Richardson, Texas, to be with her daughter, Dorislee and son-in-law Rieves Hoffpauer.