Hale Storm. Kevin Cowherd
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Eddie’s sense that he wasn’t getting enough support and recognition at home, especially from his father. He also began to chafe at what he saw as the elder Hale’s truculent nature.
“The stuff my father would say, the negative stuff, drove me,” he said.
On family car trips, when a song by rock n’ roll pioneers Elvis Presley or Bill Haley and the Comets came on the radio, young Eddie would pipe up from the back seat: “Isn’t this cool!?” But invariably, he says, his father would shake his head and mutter: “Rock and roll is never gonna make it.”
And when Eddie played YMCA football as a scrappy but under-sized lineman in the 14-16 age division, he remembered his father saying, referring to a couple of neighborhood kids: “Why can’t you play like Fuzzy Lomax and Jesse Owens?”
“These were older guys with, like, mustaches!” Hale says now. “They probably had kids, too! It was like my father was embarrassed at the way I was playing. You know what that does to your self-esteem? I remember thinking: I will never be like him.”
To this day, though, Barry Hale and his sisters Jean and Robin—Jane died of breast cancer in 2004—remain mystified by Hale’s resentment toward his father, who died in 2002. The rest of the Hale siblings insist Eddie was treated no differently than anyone else in the household by a loving, hard-working father trying to raise five children amid growing financial pressures.
“We often wonder what family Ed grew up in,” Barry Hale says of Ed’s perception of their father. “The house was a happy home!”
Nevertheless, Eddie’s discontent with his home life was very real. He was so unhappy at times that he began doing financial calculations on the total cost of his upbringing, with the idea of paying his parents back and never speaking to them again. In addition, he hatched elaborate plans to run away from home on a raft, Huck Finn-style.
At one point during his teenage years, the boy who never shied away from work also didn’t shy away from another way to make a buck.
When an older kid in the neighborhood offered $15 to anyone who would steal four spinner hubcaps for a 1957 Chevy, 15-year-old Eddie Hale leaped at the opportunity.
On a cold winter night, he snuck out of his house. Along with a friend named Leroy Grey, he canvassed the streets until the right car was found. The hubcaps came off easily. With each boy carrying two, they decided to split up.
But the two were not exactly master criminals.
Right away, Eddie Hale violated rule no. 1 for those engaged in the legendary shady enterprise known as Midnight Auto Supply: don’t walk around with the stolen goods in plain sight.
First, a drunk in a pickup truck spotted the skinny kid carrying two shiny hubcaps at 2 in the morning. He chased Eddie and grabbed him from behind, and both slipped on the icy sidewalk. Somehow, Eddie whacked him with a hubcap and took off.
But the get-away was an unmitigated disaster, too.
Hiding behind swamp grass in Bear Creek, he fell through the thin ice up to his ankles. Wet, shivering, with cuts and bruises all over his body, he hid the hubcaps behind a gas station and walked home.
Just as he pulled up to the house, though, so did the cops. They threw him in the back of the squad car and took him back to where he’d tussled with the drunk, now being tended by paramedics. In a scene right out of a sitcom, the beered-up man, grimacing in pain, somehow raised himself from his stretcher when he spotted Eddie and cried “That’s him!” Then he was taken away in an ambulance with neck and back injuries.
Eddie was hauled down to the Dundalk police station and tossed in a cell. His father was called to get him. Not surprisingly, the senior Hale was not in a swell mood after being awakened in the middle of the night to retrieve his son, the budding young hoodlum.
“I have all I can do to keep from mopping up all of Dundalk with you,” he said to the boy, who fully agreed a beating would be justified.
Things did not get a whole lot better for Eddie Hale the next day.
His father insisted that he go to school, despite his late-night “crime spree” and the fact he was working on about two hours sleep. Later that morning, he was summoned over the loudspeaker to the principal’s office. On the way, he noticed several police cars parked in front of the school as well as a familiar-looking ’57 Chevy.
“I’m a dead man,” Eddie thought.
D-E-A-D.
At the very least, he imagined a stint in reform school in his immediate future, with the possibility of all sorts of violent sexual assaults on his person. With the principal and the cops and the car owner staring balefully at him, Eddie Hale caved like a mineshaft and admitted to the theft.
But when the cops asked the Chevy owner if he wanted to press charges, he shook his head and said no.
“Look at him, he’s all beat up,” the man said, pointing at the boy. “Just give me my hubcaps back.”
“The man was smart enough and decent enough to realize it was just a kid making a stupid mistake,” says Hale now. Young Eddie apologized profusely, returned the stolen items and promptly ended his life of crime for good.
Years later, when invited to speak at the commencement exercises for the graduating class of the Baltimore County police academy, Hale would tell the story of his early brush with the law and joke: “If I’d been successful, I probably would have been the Tony Soprano of Maryland.”
But real-life crime czars had a knack for ending up behind bars or in a cemetery with a weeping parent’s tears dampening their headstone. Even at a young age, neither of those prospects held any allure for young Eddie Hale.
As a headstrong kid growing up in a large, boisterous family where money was tight, he was looking for something.
But the life of a bad guy definitely wasn’t it.
Eddie Hale had much bigger plans.
CHAPTER 2
Starting slow, dreaming big
By his senior year at Sparrow’s Point High in 1964, a sense of despair gripped Ed Hale as he contemplated a future of limited possibilities.
“It was a feeling almost bordering on desperation,” he would say later. ‘’Cause I knew I hated school and didn’t want to go to college. Only about 10 per cent of our graduating class went to college anyway. It was just assumed you were going to work at the steel mill or be a laborer. Or be drafted and go off to Vietnam and get killed.”
The summer after graduating from high school, he worked at Beth Steel in the open hearth and blast furnace. It was a tough, dirty, otherworldly atmosphere that left him awestruck and wondering how anyone could drag themselves out of bed every morning and work there year after year after year.
“The absolute heat and violence of what was going on there, the size of these buckets of molten steel!” he recalled. “They would tap the furnace with dynamite and there would be this big explosion! Sparks would fly all over the place and you’re standing there! I worked in something called the mold yard. They would pour liquid steel so it could be transported into these sand frames and they would dump this stuff. And if there was spillage, I’d go in and shovel up the rocks or clean up the sand out of these molds.”
The heat was stifling and danger was ever-present.
“And I wasn’t savvy enough to realize: one misstep and you were dead. There was always this story: ‘Did you hear about Bill? Bill fell into the bucket (of molten steel) and was vaporized!’ So they would dip out some of the steel, a brick of it, and give it to his family for burial.
“People got their arms and legs cut off. I’m 19, working in the blast furnace, working underground in something called the stock house. The stock house feeds this conveyor, a little automated train car that would go by slowly and noiselessly. And I’d have to throw rocks in this train car as it passed me. And it’s 2:30 in the morning, obviously you’re