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 not in the right frame of mind. And I’d be backed up to this train car and it would hit me every once in a while. And if you got hit and you fell backward rather than forward, you’d get cut in half.”
But it was also while working in the blast furnace that Eddie Hale arrived at an epiphany about the direction his working life would take—or not take.
“I’d be standing there,” he recalled, “and they’d have these trenches where molten steel would come down. It would be stuff called slag.”
Slag was stony waste matter separated from metals during the smelting or refining of ore.
“And the slag would still be glowing and they would send us in there with big sledge hammers to break it up and then shovel it into containers to take away. And your feet would burn. You’d put car tires—you know, like retreads from trucks?—on your feet so they wouldn’t get blistered. Once your feet got hot, they never cooled off—ever.
“The whole time I’m thinking: ‘I’m never working here. Never. I don’t care how much money they pay me. I gotta do something. I don’t know what it is. But I gotta do something.”
He decided to give college a shot after all, enrolling at Essex Community College in February of 1965. First he had to take remedial courses in math and English at Dundalk High School in order to be accepted. But except for playing tennis and ogling pretty girls, not much about undergrad life appealed to him, even though he had vague—and unrealistic—aspirations of someday being a doctor.
That same year, he started dating a girl named Sheila Thacker. She was a funny, artsy, black-haired beauty who was a dead ringer for Cher Bono, just emerging as a pop-singing sensation with the husband-wife duo Sonny & Cher.
Sheila was a senior at Patapsco High in Dundalk. At a Halloween party at her house, a girlfriend introduced her to Ed Hale, who proceeded to put the moves on her. They were not, both parties agree, the smoothest ever recorded in the history of romance.
“He had seen me around—I had caught his eye,” Sheila recalled with a laugh. “He spent the night talking about what a great tennis player he was and how he had this red Austin-Healey sports car.”
“I was still this little twerpy guy,” Hale says sheepishly. “I had no game, no bullshit with girls. I was actually fairly shy.”
In May of 1966, after two desultory years at Essex, Ed Hale enlisted in the Air Force to avoid getting shipped off to the jungles of Vietnam. Still entertaining thoughts of a career in medicine, he signed up to be a medical corpsman.
But a few months before he was to report to basic training in Amarillo, Tex., he was playing in a tennis tournament in Vermont when he received a phone call from Sheila. She had big news: she was pregnant.
The bulletin left 19-year-old Ed Hale reeling. He nearly dropped the phone.
“The range of emotions (was) all negative,” he recalled. “There was no upside to me getting married. I’m going in the Air Force, she’s pregnant, I don’t know how I’m going to support her, where she’s gonna live . . .
“But I knew I had to do the right thing. I had to marry her. ‘Cause that’s what was typically done back then.”
The next day, anxious and confused, with a thousand thoughts swirling around in his head, he headed home to break the news to his parents and contemplate his future. Barreling down the Connecticut Turnpike in a ’58 Dodge with rear fins so sharp they could slice meat, he wracked his brain for a way out of his predicament.
“I thought: ‘You know what? Maybe I won’t face the music,’” he remembered. “’Maybe when I cross the George Washington Bridge, I’ll just keep heading west and go right to Texas.’”
Instead,
