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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, he picked up a hitch-hiking sailor headed for Philadelphia 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.