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CHAPTER 5

The Midas Touch Redux

Before the Boston Street facility was sold to the city, it would prove to have an enormous impact on Ed Hale’s fortunes in a totally unexpected way.

The reason: it had a pier that he rented to a barge line. And in addition to enjoying the spectacular view of Fort McHenry, the famous star-shaped fort that defended Baltimore Harbor from the British in the War of 1812, Hale began studying how the Norfolk, Baltimore and Carolina Barge Line operated.

He soon arrived at a predictable conclusion: he could do the job better.

Containerization was in the midst of transforming the trucking, shipping and railroad industries. With standardized dimensions, steel containers carrying virtually everything could be loaded, unloaded and stacked efficiently for transport by any mode without being opened.

Hale had noticed that the NB&C barges had space for 60 containers. What if he bought his own barges and outfitted them to carry even more containers? Wouldn’t that save on truck fuel costs and be a more efficient way to transport cargo up and down the East Coast?

Wouldn’t it also be a boon to the environment? After all, more containers on barges meant fewer exhaust-spewing trucks hauling the same cargo on the roads.

Hale had actually approached NB&C about buying the company earlier and found the owner to be agreeable. But when his father condescendingly told him to “stop messing around and buy those barges,” a defiant Hale promptly called the owner, Leigh Hogshire, and called off the deal.

That did it, Hale thought. Now I’m definitely buying my own barges.

First stop was Houma, Louisiana, where he discovered two barges for sale in a swampy lowland. They were, at first glance, a soggy, sorry-looking sight.

“The barges were submerged,” Hale recalled. “They would sink them in the bayou so hurricanes wouldn’t come in and float them away.”

Hale sent a tugboat down to Houma and had the barges towed back to Baltimore. They were named the Norfolk Trader and the Philadelphia Trader. Retrofitted and loaded a certain way, they could accommodate a whopping 420 containers. And in 1985, Hale Container Lines officially opened for business at 1801 South Clinton Street in Canton.

To the delight of such champions of East Baltimore as Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md) and Rep. Helen Delich Bentley (R-Md), Hale had two more barges, the Baltimore Trader and Boston Trader, built at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrow’s Point shipyard.

Even though the barges would cost him between $600,000 and $800,000 more than they would if built elsewhere, Hale said he contracted with Beth Steel “out of a sense of loyalty.” The kid who had once made $4 an hour working in the steel mill had never forgotten how good the mill was to the thousands of young people hired to decent-paying jobs right out of high school.

(Thinking it would look far too pretentious, though, Hale refused to christen his barges with champagne. “Fuck no!” he laughed when that was suggested. “It’s a barge.”

(Instead, when Bentley, now a former congresswoman, was invited to help launch one of his first vessels, she christened it with—what else?—a bottle of National Bohemian beer, Baltimore’s beloved “Natty Boh.”)

At its height, Hale’s fleet would consist of seven barges—one, the Liberty Trader, would be bigger than a football field and capable of hauling 730 containers. It would also include four tugboats: the Ashley Hale and Alexandra Hale, named for the two daughters he fathered later with his girlfriend, Michele Guttierrez; the Carol Hale, named for his mother; and the Larkin Hale, chosen in honor of his grandmother, whose maiden name was Larkin.

For the next dozen years, Hale would have barges running up and down the East Coast, as well as to such far-flung destinations as Alexandria, Egypt, French Guiana, the Canadian Maritime province of New Brunswick, and Crete, the largest of the Greek islands.

He would soon be the Port of Baltimore’s biggest employer and serve as an advisor to Mayor Schaefer on port issues in addition to accompanying the mayor on trade missions overseas.

In his own unique way, Hale even managed to forge tiny diplomatic breakthroughs that would help his hometown. He chartered tugs and barges with Orient Overseas Container Line, a huge shipping firm headquartered in Hong Kong. And his influence with Captain Shiuan Y. Kuo, chairman of Evergreen Shipping in Taipei, helped promote trade between Taiwan and Baltimore.

(On a summer trip to sweltering Taipei with Schaefer, the Taiwanese were also treated to the surreal sight of Schaefer and Hale, exhausted from jet-lag, singing an absolutely horrid karaoke version of “Jingle Bell Rock.”

(Both men had taken the stage thinking the song machine was programmed for “Jingle Bells.” And since neither knew the words to “Jingle Bell Rock,” they were promptly booed off the stage in a country where karaoke was considered only slightly less important than life, death and baseball.)

When Saudi Arabian Prince Salman bin Sultan visited Baltimore in the late 80’s, Schaefer asked Hale to give the prince a tour of the port. Hale hosted the Saudi delegation aboard his luxury yacht, the 85-foot-long Exuberance, which had once been the America’s Cup Committee boat.

Hale was told that Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, the Saudi capital, spoke no English. But at one point, as the two men sat alone in the back of the yacht, the prince tapped Hale’s leg and whispered: “I bet you have a lot of fun on this boat.”

Incredulous, Hale said: “You speak English!”

“I do have my moments,” the prince replied with an impish grin.

“It was just like in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’” Hale would recall, “when Jack Nicholson is sitting next to the Chief and the Chief has been silent the whole movie—and suddenly he speaks for the first time. And Nicholson looks at him and says: ‘Goddamn, Chief! You can talk!’”

In the next breath, the prince mentioned that he, too, had a yacht, a monster 167-footer at his beck and call.

“Well, you win then,” Hale said with a laugh.

“But I can’t have as much fun on it,” the prince said wistfully, “because my wife is around all the time.”

The two men hit it off so well that Hale was promptly invited to Riyadh with a select delegation of American businessmen, which helped him cultivate ties with the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia.

In addition to his burgeoning barge business, Hale’s trucking business was booming, too. He was now operating 500 trucks and countless trailers from 13 terminals all over the East Coast and extending out to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Yet no matter how successful he became, he could never escape the sense that he was constantly being judged as someone from “the other side of the tracks.”

Around this time, he was invited by a tennis-playing acquaintance to a swanky dinner party in the Greenspring Valley. But the conversation around the table soon took an ugly turn—at least for Hale—when the well-heeled guests started sniping at people from Dundalk.

“They were ridiculing everything about us!” he recalled. “How we looked, how we talked, how we dressed!”

Hale seethed, but said nothing. Still, the bad-mouthing of his home turf stunned him. Until that moment, he had never thought of himself as having grown up in a hard-scrabble setting, never mind a place that would possibly be the target of derision.

Now, even with his trucking and barge firms generating between $75 million and $100 million, he was sure the “blue-bloods” still thought of him as an ignorant redneck who had somehow lucked out in business.

At times, he wondered if his father felt the same way. Only what happened at these times was far more hurtful.

One day, not long after Hale had begun using a computer for his business for the first time, his father visited his office.