Hale.)
Friend and foe alike marvel at his energy levels, work habits, ability to juggle a dozen different projects at once and refusal to be intimidated by the doubters and nay-sayers that have watched him from the sidelines throughout his career.
His first wife, Sheila Thacker, calls him an “unstoppable force.”
This, then, is his story.
On second thought, Hollywood may want to take notice after all.
CHAPTER 1
“He was just an average good kid”
Hanging on one wall in Ed Hale’s Rosedale office is a telling document, framed and displayed behind glass like a museum piece.
It’s his original sixth grade report card for the 1957-1958 school year at Edgemere Elementary. Sprinkled with mostly B’s and C’s, it also contains a note from his teacher, Joe Waurin.
It is not the sort of note that would make a parent’s heart soar.
“I wish you would speak to Edwin concerning his behavior in class,” Waurin wrote. “For the past few weeks, it has been very bad and his attention in discussions has been bad also.”
Carol Hale wasted little time in responding.
“I am sure you will see a change in Eddie,” she wrote. “Both his father and I were very ashamed to hear this.”
Translation: I will smack him upside the head so hard his kids will be born with a headache. You will have no further problems with the little monster. That’s a promise.
Hale displays the report card as a self-deprecating memento and a connection to his roots more than anything else. But maybe it also foreshadowed how the eternally-restless boy was loathe to conform to the dictums of others and destined to take a different path in life.
He was born in the blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood of Highlandtown on Nov. 15, 1946, the oldest of five children. The noisy birth took place on the third floor of his grandparents’ house for the most practical of reasons: money was tight and there was often no room across the street at City Hospital, where the Baby Boom of the post-World War II years was in full flower.
His father, Edwin H. Hale, was a Navy war veteran 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
