| Foundry patterns, old wire ice cream baskets, Coke cases, and other “found” items were being phased out by industry, and people were willing to buy these discards and re-use them. Reilly took advantage of the opportunity, and found a small live/work warehouse space on Filbert Street in San Francisco (where Levi Plaza is today) and based his enterprise there. “Walls And Corners” opened for business, allowing Reilly to make a living, but also to have a home base for the work he had the most passion for – politics.
While Reilly started up his first successful business, he was also establishing himself as an effective campaign manager. In 1971, young Clint Reilly teamed up with a then-unknown criminologist and former San Francisco police officer named Richard Hongisto, whom he had met while working on the Little Kerner Report, to run his insurgent campaign for Sheriff of San Francisco. With a small budget and Reilly’s strategic counsel, Hongisto defeated a three-term incumbent – a historic upset win in San Francisco politics.
This upset win helped Reilly land a job as the Northern California media coordinator for the "No on Proposition 22" campaign to defeat an agri-business supported initiative designed to block the United Farm Workers (UFW) from organizing workers into free and independent unions.
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