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, and they weren’t any more intelligent that I was, either.”
The encouragement from Kid Gore only deepened 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
