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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 an onerous task. He wanted Hale to tell the manager he was replacing, a man named Rudy Paycik, that he was now being transferred to company headquarters in Berlin, N.J.

Paycik was a former Marine who fancied himself a bad-ass and carried a .45. He was also known to have a volcanic temper. Predictably, he exploded when a nervous Ed Hale passed along the message, accusing the young man of going behind his back and not letting him know the big boss was in town.

“I was prepared to take a beating,” Hale recalled of that moment.

Yet if getting beat up was what it took to get such a stupendous raise, he thought, so be it. But a fuming Paycik simply stomped away when told he’d been supplanted. And within days, there was a new top dog running the show at Atco Trailer.

As a manager, Hale proved to be something of a wunderkind in the rough-and-tumble world of trucking. He wanted to know everything about the business, sensing he might one day strike out on his own. When real estate magnate Harry Weinberg and his brother, Nathan, stopped by to collect rent, Hale would endlessly pick their brains about the worth of nearby properties and what constituted favorable leasing terms for a truck terminal.

He hustled business by getting a list of members of the Maryland Motor Truck Association and calling each one to see if they wanted to rent a trailer.

“He was a hip-shooter in those days, a Mississippi gambler,” said Bob Meehan, an executive with the White Motor Corp., a Cleveland outfit that sold the young Atco lot manager five trucks. “He was demanding, a tough buyer.”

Tranchitella became a father figure to Hale, whose responsibilities with the company quickly grew. Soon the older man would task Hale with opening new offices for the company in Richmond, Va., Allentown, Pa., and Philadelphia.

“I knew I could trust him. He was a go-getter and reliable,” said Tranchitella.

In fact, he grew so fond of the clever, conscientious Hale that he would tell people: “Ed is like the son I never had.”

At the same time, Hale’s relationship with his own father was becoming increasingly tempestuous.

When the younger Hale was first hired at Atco and informed his dad that he’d be making $125 a week at the new job, his father had snorted: “I’d rather see you be a goddamn garbage man. I can get you a job at C&P Telephone or at the gas and electric company.”

Then a few months after Hale got his promotion and raise from Tranchitella, there was another deflating encounter with his dad.

This one occurred right after Ed paid cash for a brand new Oldsmobile 442. It was the ultimate “muscle car,” a dazzling speed machine built, as the numbers in its name signaled, with a four-barrel carburetor, four-speed manual transmission and dual exhausts.

“It was hot!” Hale recalls. “It was a convertible, a dark brown metallic color with tan stripes and a tan interior. It was beautiful. I mean, it was smoking!”

Bursting with pride over his new ride, he drove it to his parents’ house to show it off. But he left feeling disheartened when his father simply gazed at the car from the living room window and said: “Huh. Next time you want to go out to dinner or go to the movies, just take that car for a ride around the block.”

Meaning: boy, what a dumb purchase. And it’s going to suck all the money out of your pockets, too.

As the months went on, relations would become strained with another close family member, too.

At the time, business was booming at Atco. And Hale was held in such high esteem as a manager that he was able to hire his brother to run a new lot the company was opening in northeast Philadelphia. Barry Hale was 21 and he and his wife, Jean, were newlyweds when he took over the new branch with 20 trailers and very little business.

“You got one and a half phone calls a day,” Barry Hale recalled. “It was like ‘HELLO?’” Followed by the chirping of crickets echoing through the emptiness.

Nevertheless, Barry was happy to have the job. But when he and Jean returned to Baltimore for Thanksgiving and the Hale clan was sitting down to dinner at the Sparrow’s Point house, Ed asked Barry a seemingly innocent question: “Are you going home tonight?”

“What do you mean, am I going home?” Barry replied.

He had planned to spend a couple of days relaxing in his hometown after the holiday.

“We’re open tomorrow,” Ed replied evenly.

Meaning: if we’re open here, you better be open in Philly, too.

Barry Hale was astonished.

“It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving!” he recalls of that conversation. “There’s zero activity! Nothing’s gonna happen! So I got a dose of Big Ed right out of the gate. He wasn’t kidding around.”

Nevertheless, at 8 a.m. the Friday after Thanksgiving, Barry’s Atco lot was open for business—or no business, as it happened.

Barry would end up working for the company for two more years. But when he asked Ed for a $10 raise and was refused, he remembers thinking: “I don’t think I’m going to do too well with this arrangement. There’s only room for one bull moose in the forest.”

Soon, he left to start his own trailer rental company. Barry Hale proved to be a savvy businessman, too. Today he owns Hale Trailer Brake and Wheel, a $150 million company based in Voorhees, N.J.

But the brothers’ relationship would be strained going forward. While Barry thought Ed was too much of a hard-ass and self-promoter, Ed felt Barry was wildly judgmental and ungrateful for all the help his older brother had given him to get a toe-hold in the business.

In 1975, Tranchitella sold Atco to Industrial Bank and Trust of Philadelphia. He made provisions for Hale, now the vice-president and general manager, to stay on. By now the young man was making between $40,000-$50,000 a year when most of his friends were lucky to be making half that.

But the ever-restless Hale was already looking around for his next business opportunity, and a way to move up in the world and make even more money.

He wouldn’t have to look far.

The trucking business was experiencing a gold rush of sorts. And Ed Hale was bold enough to stake a big claim.