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CHAPTER 4

You snooze, you lose

After a client in New York agreed to rent trailers from Atco but complained about not having anyone to haul containers between the train station in Baltimore and the Pier 10 docks in Canton, a light bulb went off in Hale’s head, just like in the cartoons.

“Hell,” he thought, “I can do that.”

So it was that in March of that year, he started his own trucking company, Port East Transfer Inc. It was, to put it kindly, a bare-bones operation.

“We had no trucks, no trailers, no terminals,” Hale recalled.

Instead, he hired independent truckers and ran things out of the trunk of his car at first, then from his Pikesville home.

“I’d run out and stop a truck that was bobtailing,” he said, referring to a tractor without the trailer, “and I’d say ‘You want to make 20 bucks real quick?’ And they’d go pick up a load. It was like the Wild West!”

Hale was still working for Atco and didn’t hide the fact that he had started his own small trucking firm on the side. But his Atco bosses wondered if he was devoting enough time to their company. When a new supervisor asked him to choose between Atco and his fledgling business, the choice was an easy one for the kid from eastern Baltimore County who had always harbored outsized expectations of life.

He was already making more money from Port East than he was from Atco, anyway. At 28, Ed Hale was finally ready to strike out on his own.

Before long, he was running his new trucking operation in another garden spot—a cramped office trailer on Newkirk Street in Canton, this one without indoor plumbing or water.

In the winter, when he’d go to the outhouse to relieve himself and a truck would rumble overhead on Interstate 895, it would spray ice and slush that sounded like thunder as it pounded the metal roof.

Hale learned quickly that the trucking business was not for the faint of heart. Not long after starting Port East, he received a call from the traffic manager of one of his accounts, Lever Brothers. The company was preparing for a strike at its big soap factory on Holabird Avenue.

Would Hale be willing to cross the picket line? If he did, the manager promised, the company would give him all the business he could handle, which would be considerable. Lever Brothers was still one of the biggest producers of laundry products in the world, with over 1,000 employees at the Holabird plant.

Hale knew what awaited him if he defied the strikers. The threat of violence was very real. He called Ty Pruitt, one of his competitors in the business. The conversation was short and sweet.

“Are you going to cross the picket line?” Hale asked.

“I will if you will,” the flinty Pruitt responded.

“OK, I will,” Hale said.

He felt he had little choice.

“My drivers would have probably taken their trucks and gone someplace else to work, and I would have lost all my manpower,” he explained years later. “And there was the promise—the expectation—of more business.”

A few days later, some 20 trucks in all crossed the picket line, with Ed Hale and Ty Pruitt leading the convoy. The atmosphere was charged as they rolled up. The police were maintaining a tense presence from a distance. But angry, placard-carrying men and women quickly converged on the trucks.

“There were people throwing things at us, rocks and bolts, people swearing, jumping in front of the trucks,” Hale recalled.

“Oh, it was brutal,” Pruitt added. “Brutal! The entrance to Lever Brothers was (narrow), so you really had to almost push your way through with the truck. One of my drivers, they actually spit in his face. He got out and grabbed the guy by the neck and had him locked up.”

Retaliation for failing to honor the picket line was swift—and not totally unexpected by either man.

When Hale arrived early the next morning to open his facility, it looked like a war zone—literally. Someone had shot up the place and done massive damage to 10 tractors and 20 trailers.

“I don’t know if they used a machine gun or what,” Hale said. “Every single window was shot out and every single tire was flattened.”

Ty Pruitt’s trucks were also vandalized: someone had taken a tire iron and punctured every one of the radiators on his trucks.

“It was a message” from the strikers, said Pruitt. But he, like Hale, looked at it as the cost of doing business. “At the time I was young and didn’t give a shit. Economically it hurt, for sure. Probably cost me a thousand dollars a truck.”

The police made it clear they couldn’t help. Shocking absolutely no one, the cops had been unable to find eyewitnesses to the destruction and had few clues to work with. Lever Brothers reimbursed Hale 100 per cent for the damages, but never gave him any business after that—a betrayal he never forgot.

“That was an eye-opener,” he said. “It left a lasting impression on me.”

It was Hale’s first real trouble with unions, and it would go on to influence his feelings about organized labor for the rest of his life. He had nothing against unions before the Lever Brothers fiasco. After all, he’d been a member in good-standing of the steelworkers’ and ironworkers’ unions as a youth.

But why couldn’t the unions recognize that, as the owner of a trucking firm now, he needed to keep his people working, too?

A few months later, Hale was driving with Sheila along Boston Street in Canton when he spotted a piece of waterfront property littered with junk piles and coal ash. A sign stuck in the ground said: “For Sale. Penn Central Railroad.”

Intrigued, he stopped to investigate. Other signs saying “Keep Out” dotted the land, but Hale ignored them. As it happened, he was looking to expand his business and needed more space, and he wondered if the Penn Central lot was suitable.

In the mid-70’s, Canton was a forlorn-looking neighborhood of abandoned warehouses, decrepit buildings and rotting wharves, and this place was hardly idyllic. But clambering over railroad ties, he spotted the flag at Fort McHenry in the distance and a shimmering expanse of blue water that sold him on the land immediately.

He had always been drawn to the Chesapeake Bay and he found this scene captivating.

“I thought, if you’re going to build a truck terminal, why not have a nice view?” Hale recalled. “It doesn’t have to be this grimy place with a cinderblock building and weeds all around it.”

He took out a small business loan and bought the property for $170,000, splitting the money with the city to settle an old tax lien. He stuck an office trailer on it, cleaned it up and opened up the view. It soon caught the eye of Baltimore’s energetic, irascible mayor, William Donald Schaefer.

Schaefer was on a mission to claim waterfront property for the city as part of a grand plan to develop a “Gold Coast” in Canton, envisioning a promenade that would go all the way around to Fort McHenry. He dispatched his young assistant, Mark Wasserman, to see if Hale would sell his land.

“My... recollection,” Wasserman says now, “is he wanted no parts of selling it.”

Hale was still new in the business and had nowhere else to park his trucks. But Schaefer refused to take no for an answer.

Soon Wasserman was back, summoning Hale to a meeting with the mayor. When he was ushered into a ceremonial room at City Hall, Hale found Schaefer striking a regal pose in an ornate chair that looked like a throne.

“I understand you’re playing hardball with that property, son,” Schaefer began, skipping any preliminaries.

“Well, Your Majesty,” Hale shot back, “I don’t have any other place to go with my business.”

“I think I was going to call him ‘Your Honor’ and I just got flummoxed,” Hale would say of the “Your Majesty” crack. “But he did look like he was on a throne.”

Despite the impudent remark, the two men took an immediate liking to one another. Schaefer had a warm spot for military veterans and admired Hale’s moxie. Hale appreciated the mayor’s direct manner and his evident passion for Baltimore.

By the time the meeting broke up, Hale was willing to strike a verbal deal of sorts.

“I’m going to make something of myself,” he told Schaefer. “Once I do and I find another place for my business, I’ll sell the land to you.”

The two men shook hands. Within two years, with his business growing, Hale found an 18-acre piece of property on 68th Street in Rosedale suitable for his needs.

Keeping his vow to the mayor, he sold the land on Boston Street to the city. The price: $2.3 million, a handsome return on his original $170,000 investment. (Years later the stretch of land would become the Korean War Memorial Park and a vital piece of the waterfront promenade the hard-charging mayor had dreamed of for so long.)

Not yet 30 years old, Ed Hale was a certified millionaire. But instead of celebrating, he decided to plow nearly every penny of his settlement check back into his business. By now it had grown to include 50 trucks, both company-owned and owner-operated.

“He called us into the office the next day,” recalled Ken Jones, then a newly-hired Port East employee. “He told us how much he got for the land. Then he told us he could retire and live comfortably for the rest of his life. But he said that wasn’t what he wanted to do. He was going to invest this money back into the company.

“He wanted us to know that he wanted the company to grow, and that we were all going to keep our jobs. It got us incredibly energized.”

For Hale, though, the rapid growth of his trucking firm did not come without headaches. His operation soon became a target for local 557 of the Teamsters union, which pressed to organize his drivers, roughly 40 in number.

Hale wanted no part of the union. His stance on unions had hardened since becoming embroiled in the Lever Brothers strike. By now he had seen the Teamsters run other companies into the ground. He found the Teamster work rules abhorrent, along with the dictum that management wasn’t allowed to communicate directly with workers, and had to instead go through shop stewards.

He wondered: why was the union attempting to bully its way into a heretofore content work force? What was the point of that? To cause trouble for trouble’s sake?

“I thought: not only am I a fair guy, I’m a good guy, a working guy,” he said. “I’m just like you. Why are you doing this to me?”

To anyone who’d listen, he’d insist: “The union doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the rank-and-file.” And he’d tell his workers, only half-jokingly: “If you fucking guys organize me, I’ll make this place a banana stand.”

Nevertheless, he had no choice but to schedule an election to determine whether his drivers wanted a union shop. A booth was set up at his truck terminal for secret balloting. On hand to oversee the process was one of Hale’s people, as well as a Teamster representative and an official from the National Labor Relations Board.

When the balloting was complete, the NLRB agent announced the results: 39-0 against union representation, with one ballot defaced.

Amid cheers from Hale’s drivers, the agent asked: “Want me to read what it says on the defaced ballot?”

Hale shrugged. “Sure, go ahead.”

The agent took a deep breath. “It says, ‘Fuck you, unions. Unions suck. Unions out.”

Now the cheers and whooping were deafening.

To celebrate the resounding victory—and to stick it to the Teamsters one more time— Hale treated everyone to drinks and dinner at Jimmy’s Seafood Restaurant on Holabird Avenue, a well-known union hangout.

“Everyone was so relieved,” he recalled of that night. “There had been such tension. The Teamsters never tried to organize me in Baltimore again.”

Not only that, but he would go on to beat back union challenges to his facilities in Pittsburgh, Boston and Philadelphia as his trucking empire grew.

Still, as all-consuming as his new business was, the young mogul remained restless. Already he was looking around for other opportunities to make a name for himself.

And once again, in an almost spiritual fashion, he’d be drawn to the water.