and decided to continue on to Baltimore. He arrived at his parents’ house at mid-afternoon on a Sunday, during a family cook-out. The news that their son was about to become a father did not sit well with Edwin and Carol Hale, who seemed, in equal measures, appalled and embarrassed.
“I really thought at that point that my life was over,” Ed said. “I thought: ‘I will never get out of this.’”
Ed and Sheila were married Aug. 25, 1966 at a church in Winchester, Va. Ed continued to work at Beth Steel for a few months, then worked for the ironworkers union until leaving for the Air Force in November.
Eddie Jr. was born Feb. 3, 1967, while Ed was away, and lived with Sheila at her mother’s house in Dundalk. After basic training, Ed was given his choice of assignments and settled on Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass, where Sheila and the baby soon joined him.
By this point, Hale had become so adept at tennis that he was chosen for the team that would represent the base in tournaments. It was not an awful way to serve one’s country: donning a polo shirt and shorts and hitting a fuzzy white ball over a net at the base country club, then retiring for a few drinks. And the tennis team traveled and played in some of the most beautiful locales all over the U.S.
But soon new orders arrived, signaling an end to this idyllic life.
Airman First Class Ed Hale was being assigned to Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside of Saigon. It was the height of the Vietnam War. Although he had no way of knowing it, in just a few months the air base would become a major target of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army during the fierce military campaign known as the Tet Offensive.
“I thought it was a death sentence,” Hale said of his new assignment, and his spirits sank.
Like many of his generation back then, he was opposed to the unpopular war, skeptical of the so-called “Domino Theory” espoused by President Lyndon B. Johnson that all of Southeast Asia was in danger of falling to the communists. He was also deeply mistrustful of the motives of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the “old dudes” sending young men off to battle for what seemed like a senseless cause.
Two of his classmates at Sparrow’s Point High had been killed in Vietnam less than five months after graduation. And while he didn’t see himself as a coward, the prospect of returning with missing limbs or in a flag-draped coffin unnerved him.
But fate soon intervened, in the form of a health emergency suffered by his young wife.
The couple learned that Sheila needed an extensive gall-bladder operation and would be laid up for some time, unable to work and earn money. One-year-old Eddie Jr. needed to be cared for, too.
Ed requested and was granted a hardship discharge from active duty. The upside: he would not be huddling under enemy rocket fire on the sun-baked airfield at Tan Son Nhut after all.
Looking back on it now, he says: “I think the discharge saved my life.”
In August of 1968, he left the Air Force, facing a decidedly unsettled future.
For a time, he worked at Eastpoint Formal Menswear and Topps department stores, grumbling about the long hours and low pay. But anyone who knew Ed Hale knew that he wasn’t long for selling tuxedos to pimply-faced prom goers or toiling in the dreary aisles of a discount chain.
“He had aspirations to big things,” Barry Hale said. “Ed was always dreaming. Dreaming big.”
And those dreams would soon become a reality.
CHAPTER 3
The Break of a Lifetime
In August of 1968, Ed Hale found himself working on a desolate lot in White Marsh renting truck trailers to Giant Food and Food Fair for a company called BDOW. It was an acronym for Best Deals on Wheels, which sounded like a used-car dealership staffed with smooth talkers in loud plaid sports jackets selling clunkers with rolled-back odometers. Mercifully, Hale was soon able to convince management to change the name to Atco Trailer Co., which by comparison sounded a thousand times classier.
Glamorous the Atco job was not, unless you found working in a hot 10-foot-by-40-foot office trailer with a balky toilet that had to be pumped from the outside enchanting. There was also this dubious perk: the weed-choked property was crawling with snakes.
Though just a clerk, Hale thrived at the business. He inspected the trailers, made sure the tires were properly inflated, did everything from billing and inventory to cutting the grass.
But some months later, fed up with making just $125 a week, he put in his two-week notice. He planned to take a job with Sea Land, the shipping and containerization company, which was offering him $200 a week.
What unfolded next, he maintains, was “the most important thing that happened to me in my life.”
When he arrived for work the next morning, the owner of the company, Tony Tranchitella, was waiting for him.
Tranchitella was a decorated World War II combat pilot who had flown 66 missions in the Pacific Theatre. A dapper man who favored stylish suits and snazzy cufflinks, he was usually behind the wheel of a late-model Cadillac.
Now he had driven down from company headquarters in New Jersey to talk to his hard-working young employee.
Hale was flattered.
“Don’t open up yet,” Tranchitella said. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”
The two ended up at the Little Chef Restaurant on Pulaski Highway. The boss got right down to business. He wanted to know why Hale was leaving.
Hale replied that he had a job offer that paid $75 more a week. With a wife and 1-year-old son at home, he needed every penny of it. Plus he was peeved that he hadn’t received bonus and commission money promised to him when he had first taken the job.
Money was so tight for the Hales that a kindly couple Ed had recently met, Mel and Ruth Kabik, had put up the $1,000 settlement fee when he went to close on his first house in Pikesville.
(“That was so important!” Hale would say years later. “No one had ever given me anything like that.” Mel Kabik, a former Marine who had fought in the South Pacific in World War II and who ran Eddie’s Supermarkets and later branched out into real estate, would remain a life-long friend and confidant.)
Tranchitella listened patiently as Hale unburdened himself and said: “I don’t want you to leave. You get it. You understand the business.”
In the next breath, he offered to put Hale in charge of the lot and raise his pay to $200 a week, plus two per cent of the gross. The cash register in Hale’s head whirred silently and his eyes widened.
“Holy shit! I’d be making $18,000 a year instead of $6,200!” he thought. (By comparison, a salary of $18,000 in 1968 would be the equivalent of nearly $125,000 today.)
“Ed was flabbergasted,” recalled Tranchitella shortly before his death in 2013 at the age of 92.
In fact, Hale was so stunned that his fork froze over his sausage and eggs as he stared at the older man, wondering if he had heard right.
He had.
Before leaving, though, Tranchitella left his young employee with
