Hale Storm. Kevin Cowherd
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and cable splicer for Baltimore Gas & Electric, born and raised in Lynn, Mass. His mother was the daughter of a Baltimore City Fire Department captain, Frank Feehley.
When Eddie was 6 years old and his brother Barry was 3, the Hales moved to Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore County, in search of grassy spaces where the kids could play. They settled on a bungalow across from the Sparrow’s Point Country Club and not far from Bethlehem Steel Corp., the mammoth shipbuilding and steel-making plant that dominated the area in the years following the war.
From all accounts, the neighborhood was a fine place for a kid to grow up. The area was populated with the young families of steel-workers, lured by the prospect of steady jobs and affordable housing. There was no shortage of friends for the Hale brothers, who were soon joined by identical twin sisters Jean and Jane, and a younger sister, Robin. The back yard, ringed by a chain link fence, became a gathering place for the neighborhood children and the site of countless ball games of all sorts.
Little Eddie played well with others—at least outside the house. But it took him a while to adjust to the idea that he’d be sharing living space with siblings and would no longer be the sole subject of his parents’ attention.
When Barry was born, Hale recalls with a chuckle: “I thought ‘Who is this guy? And what’s he doing in my house?’ He’d be lying in the crib and I’d look around”—to make sure no one was watching—“and I’d go pop. Give him a little jab.”
Once, when Barry was taking a bath in the lone bathroom in the house, Ed came in to use the toilet. Unfortunately for Barry, the toilet was directly adjacent to the bathtub. As Eddie was standing there going about his business, he suddenly shifted—“like the turret of a tank turning,” Barry recalled—and began urinating on his younger brother.
Another time, when the two boys were older and both were scrambling down the stairs to see who could get to the bathroom first, Eddie settled the matter by simply peeing on Barry through the banister railings.
But revenge was sweet. Later that day, Barry crept up behind a sleeping Eddie with the stealth of a mob hit-man and whacked his brother in the head with a hammer.
“He had just pissed in my face!” Barry recalled. “I could plead insanity.”
From an early age, the Hale kids were taught the value of hard work, self-sufficiency and contributing to the common good of the family. Barry Hale recalls his father blasting John Phillip Sousa marches from the stereo on Saturday mornings, banging a pot with a wooden spoon as he marched through the house cheerfully bellowing: “GET UP! WE HAVE CHORES!”
Eddie Hale did whatever he could to make a buck: washing cars, mowing lawns, painting houses, scrubbing floors, babysitting the neighbors’ kids. In the summer, he dove into the creek at the country club to retrieve golf balls, then sat at the front gate and sold them back to the golfers, many of whom he caddied for. In the winter, he recalled, “I would literally sleep in my clothes when it was snowing, so I could be the first one out in the morning to shovel and make money.”
“He was just an average good kid,” Carol Hale said. “We demanded respect and that (the children) be seen and not heard. We insisted that we all had dinner together, and we went to church together.”
By the time young Eddie was in grade school, his grandfather, Frank Feehley, had become a major—and beloved-- influence in his life.
A combat veteran of World War I who served with an artillery unit in France, Feehley encouraged the boy to read anything he could get his hands on—even the labels on soup cans—and to be open and inquisitive about all aspects of life.
Eddie, in turn, basked in all the attention his grandfather bestowed upon him and was transfixed by his stories of life in the fire department and the legendary blazes he and his men had fought.
“That’s no indictment of my father,” Hale says now. “My father had four other kids to worry about. He was scrambling around, working hard, working extra hours to make money.”
So it was Feehley who took Eddie to his first Orioles game, a 7-0 loss to the Cleveland Indians at Memorial Stadium. There the boy was mesmerized by the shimmering, immaculately-manicured green grass, so different from the scruffy brown fields he had played on at Edgemere Elementary School.
It was Feehley who stoked Eddie’s love of trains by taking him down to Erdman Avenue to watch the trains rumble past, laden with passengers or cargo and bound for distant, exotic places the boy could only imagine. And it was Feehley, a volunteer at the Veterans Administration hospital at Fort Howard, who persuaded a doctor to let Eddie examine blood samples under a powerful microscope, spurring an interest in microbiology that would last for years.
When Eddie was 15, his grandmother in Massachusetts got him a job at Camp Najerog, a summer camp in Vermont run by a man named Harold “Kid” Gore. It was to be a major turning point in his young life.
Kid Gore was a charismatic, regal-looking figure. A former basketball, football and baseball coach at the University of Massachusetts, he wore white, pressed linen outfits, a white duck-billed cap and held court in an Adirondack chair in front of the main house, his Dalmatians at his feet and the campers gathered around him.
Eddie Hale worked in the camp’s kitchen, a job he described as “washing dishes and pots and pans for rich kids.” At first he was painfully self-conscious of his working-class background and Baltimore accent, and of the few well-worn clothes and possessions he’d brought along.
“They definitely looked down on me,” he said of the campers. “It definitely frames who I am.... They had everything I didn’t have.”
But after a couple of weeks of camp, Kid Gore took him aside and said: “I’ve watched you play ball. You’re a good athlete. You should play tennis.”
Coming from the worldly camp director, this was music to young Eddie’s ears. It motivated immediately. “It was the first time in my life anyone had ever shown confidence in me,” he recalled.
He took to tennis with a passion and soon was beating kids who had practically grown up with a racquet in their hands. It was an enormous ego boost for the small, skinny kitchen boy who had felt so out of place weeks earlier.
(Tennis would go on to play a major role in his life. He would play at Sparrow’s Point High School his senior year with little distinction. “Never won a match. Never won a set. I don’t think I won a game!” he recalled. But he kept working at the sport, eventually becoming accomplished enough to play at Essex Community College and then for the Homeland “A” team, a top amateur squad in Baltimore, for many years of his adult life.)
When he wasn’t working or playing tennis at Camp Najerog, he fished in a cool, clear mountain lake nearby that was ringed by magnificent pine trees. The setting was a far cry from the gray, heavily-polluted waters off Sparrow’s Point where Hale and his friends would catch what he called “fish with warts.”
On his first outing on the lake, he caught the biggest fish anyone would catch that summer, a monster 19-inch bass. Soon, his industrious nature and athletic prowess earned him a much-coveted “Stout Fellow” cheer from the entire camp, led by the great Kid Gore himself:
“Boom boom, bang bang,
“Crack crack, pop pop!
“Camp Najerog, tip top!
“Yay Ed, yay Ed, yay Ed!”
Yet a day later, when Eddie violated camp rules and was caught in the kitchen after-hours with his face in a bowl of ice cream, a disappointed Kid Gore reacted as if the boy had stabbed a fellow camper.
“I wish I could take back that cheer,” Gore said with a sad shake of his head.
But it was too late for that. Eddie Hale was becoming a camp standout. And by the time he returned home to Sparrow’s Point, his self-esteem had been thoroughly turbo-charged.
“I found out that these kids from privileged backgrounds weren’t any better than me,” he said. “They weren’t any better at tennis,