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CHAPTER 1

“He was just an average good kid”

Hanging on one wall in Ed Hale’s Rosedale office is a telling document, framed and displayed behind glass like a museum piece.

It’s his original sixth grade report card for the 1957-1958 school year at Edgemere Elementary. Sprinkled with mostly B’s and C’s, it also contains a note from his teacher, Joe Waurin.

It is not the sort of note that would make a parent’s heart soar.

“I wish you would speak to Edwin concerning his behavior in class,” Waurin wrote. “For the past few weeks, it has been very bad and his attention in discussions has been bad also.”

Carol Hale wasted little time in responding.

“I am sure you will see a change in Eddie,” she wrote. “Both his father and I were very ashamed to hear this.”

Translation: I will smack him upside the head so hard his kids will be born with a headache. You will have no further problems with the little monster. That’s a promise.

Hale displays the report card as a self-deprecating memento and a connection to his roots more than anything else. But maybe it also foreshadowed how the eternally-restless boy was loathe to conform to the dictums of others and destined to take a different path in life.

He was born in the blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood of Highlandtown on Nov. 15, 1946, the oldest of five children. The noisy birth took place on the third floor of his grandparents’ house for the most practical of reasons: money was tight and there was often no room across the street at City Hospital, where the Baby Boom of the post-World War II years was in full flower.

His father, Edwin H. Hale, was a Navy war veteran and cable splicer for Baltimore Gas & Electric, born and raised in Lynn, Mass. His mother was the daughter of a Baltimore City Fire Department captain, Frank Feehley.

When Eddie was 6 years old and his brother Barry was 3, the Hales moved to Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore County, in search of grassy spaces where the kids could play. They settled on a bungalow across from the Sparrow’s Point Country Club and not far from Bethlehem Steel Corp., the mammoth shipbuilding and steel-making plant that dominated the area in the years following the war.

From all accounts, the neighborhood was a fine place for a kid to grow up. The area was populated with the young families of steel-workers, lured by the prospect of steady jobs and affordable housing. There was no shortage of friends for the Hale brothers, who were soon joined by identical twin sisters Jean and Jane, and a younger sister, Robin. The back yard, ringed by a chain link fence, became a gathering place for the neighborhood children and the site of countless ball games of all sorts.

Little Eddie played well with others—at least outside the house. But it took him a while to adjust to the idea that he’d be sharing living space with siblings and would no longer be the sole subject of his parents’ attention.

When Barry was born, Hale recalls with a chuckle: “I thought ‘Who is this guy? And what’s he doing in my house?’ He’d be lying in the crib and I’d look around”—to make sure no one was watching—“and I’d go pop. Give him a little jab.”

Once, when Barry was taking a bath in the lone bathroom in the house, Ed came in to use the toilet. Unfortunately for Barry, the toilet was directly adjacent to the bathtub. As Eddie was standing there going about his business, he suddenly shifted—“like the turret of a tank turning,” Barry recalled—and began urinating on his younger brother.

Another time, when the two boys were older and both were scrambling down the stairs to see who could get to the bathroom first, Eddie settled the matter by simply peeing on Barry through the banister railings.

But revenge was sweet. Later that day, Barry crept up behind a sleeping Eddie with the stealth of a mob hit-man and whacked his brother in the head with a hammer.

“He had just pissed in my face!” Barry recalled. “I could plead insanity.”

From an early age, the Hale kids were taught the value of hard work, self-sufficiency and contributing to the common good of the family. Barry Hale recalls his father blasting John Phillip Sousa marches from the stereo on Saturday mornings, banging a pot with a wooden spoon as he marched through the house cheerfully bellowing: “GET UP! WE HAVE CHORES!”

Eddie Hale did whatever he could to make a buck: washing cars, mowing lawns, painting houses, scrubbing floors, babysitting the neighbors’ kids. In the summer, he dove into the creek at the country club to retrieve golf balls, then sat at the front gate and sold them back to the golfers, many of whom he caddied for. In the winter, he recalled, “I would literally sleep in my clothes when it was snowing, so I could be the first one out in the morning to shovel and make money.”

“He was just an average good kid,” Carol Hale said. “We demanded respect and that (the children) be seen and not heard. We insisted that we all had dinner together, and we went to church together.”

By the time young Eddie was in grade school, his grandfather, Frank Feehley, had become a major—and beloved-- influence in his life.

A combat veteran of World War I who served with an artillery unit in France, Feehley encouraged the boy to read anything he could get his hands on—even the labels on soup cans—and to be open and inquisitive about all aspects of life.

Eddie, in turn, basked in all the attention his grandfather bestowed upon him and was transfixed by his stories of life in the fire department and the legendary blazes he and his men had fought.

“That’s no indictment of my father,” Hale says now. “My father had four other kids to worry about. He was scrambling around, working hard, working extra hours to make money.”

So it was Feehley who took Eddie to his first Orioles game, a 7-0 loss to the Cleveland Indians at Memorial Stadium. There the boy was mesmerized by the shimmering, immaculately-manicured green grass, so different from the scruffy brown fields he had played on at Edgemere Elementary School.

It was Feehley who stoked Eddie’s love of trains by taking him down to Erdman Avenue to watch the trains rumble past, laden with passengers or cargo and bound for distant, exotic places the boy could only imagine. And it was Feehley, a volunteer at the Veterans Administration hospital at Fort Howard, who persuaded a doctor to let Eddie examine blood samples under a powerful microscope, spurring an interest in microbiology that would last for years.

When Eddie was 15, his grandmother in Massachusetts got him a job at Camp Najerog, a summer camp in Vermont run by a man named Harold “Kid” Gore. It was to be a major turning point in his young life.

Kid Gore was a charismatic, regal-looking figure. A former basketball, football and baseball coach at the University of Massachusetts, he wore white, pressed linen outfits, a white duck-billed cap and held court in an Adirondack chair in front of the main house, his Dalmatians at his feet and the campers gathered around him.

Eddie Hale worked in the camp’s kitchen, a job he described as “washing dishes and pots and pans for rich kids.” At first he was painfully self-conscious of his working-class background and Baltimore accent, and of the few well-worn clothes and possessions he’d brought along.

“They definitely looked down on me,” he said of the campers. “It definitely frames who I am.... They had everything I didn’t have.”

But after a couple of weeks of camp, Kid Gore took him aside and said: “I’ve watched you play ball. You’re a good athlete. You should play tennis.”

Coming from the worldly camp director, this was music to young Eddie’s ears. It motivated immediately. “It was the first time in my life anyone had ever shown confidence in me,” he recalled.

He took to tennis with a passion and soon was beating kids who had practically grown up with a racquet in their hands. It was an enormous ego boost for the small, skinny kitchen boy who had felt so out of place weeks earlier.

(Tennis would go on to play a major role in his life. He would play at Sparrow’s Point High School his senior year with little distinction. “Never won a match. Never won a set. I don’t think I won a game!” he recalled. But he kept working at the sport, eventually becoming accomplished enough to play at Essex Community College and then for the Homeland “A” team, a top amateur squad in Baltimore, for many years of his adult life.)

When he wasn’t working or playing tennis at Camp Najerog, he fished in a cool, clear mountain lake nearby that was ringed by magnificent pine trees. The setting was a far cry from the gray, heavily-polluted waters off Sparrow’s Point where Hale and his friends would catch what he called “fish with warts.”

On his first outing on the lake, he caught the biggest fish anyone would catch that summer, a monster 19-inch bass. Soon, his industrious nature and athletic prowess earned him a much-coveted “Stout Fellow” cheer from the entire camp, led by the great Kid Gore himself:

“Boom boom, bang bang,

“Crack crack, pop pop!

“Camp Najerog, tip top!

“Yay Ed, yay Ed, yay Ed!”

Yet a day later, when Eddie violated camp rules and was caught in the kitchen after-hours with his face in a bowl of ice cream, a disappointed Kid Gore reacted as if the boy had stabbed a fellow camper.

“I wish I could take back that cheer,” Gore said with a sad shake of his head.

But it was too late for that. Eddie Hale was becoming a camp standout. And by the time he returned home to Sparrow’s Point, his self-esteem had been thoroughly turbo-charged.

“I found out that these kids from privileged backgrounds weren’t any better than me,” he said. “They weren’t any better at tennis, and they weren’t any more intelligent that I was, either.”

The encouragement from Kid Gore only deepened Eddie’s sense that he wasn’t getting enough support and recognition at home, especially from his father. He also began to chafe at what he saw as the elder Hale’s truculent nature.

“The stuff my father would say, the negative stuff, drove me,” he said.

On family car trips, when a song by rock n’ roll pioneers Elvis Presley or Bill Haley and the Comets came on the radio, young Eddie would pipe up from the back seat: “Isn’t this cool!?” But invariably, he says, his father would shake his head and mutter: “Rock and roll is never gonna make it.”

And when Eddie played YMCA football as a scrappy but under-sized lineman in the 14-16 age division, he remembered his father saying, referring to a couple of neighborhood kids: “Why can’t you play like Fuzzy Lomax and Jesse Owens?”

“These were older guys with, like, mustaches!” Hale says now. “They probably had kids, too! It was like my father was embarrassed at the way I was playing. You know what that does to your self-esteem? I remember thinking: I will never be like him.”

To this day, though, Barry Hale and his sisters Jean and Robin—Jane died of breast cancer in 2004—remain mystified by Hale’s resentment toward his father, who died in 2002. The rest of the Hale siblings insist Eddie was treated no differently than anyone else in the household by a loving, hard-working father trying to raise five children amid growing financial pressures.

“We often wonder what family Ed grew up in,” Barry Hale says of Ed’s perception of their father. “The house was a happy home!”

Nevertheless, Eddie’s discontent with his home life was very real. He was so unhappy at times that he began doing financial calculations on the total cost of his upbringing, with the idea of paying his parents back and never speaking to them again. In addition, he hatched elaborate plans to run away from home on a raft, Huck Finn-style.

At one point during his teenage years, the boy who never shied away from work also didn’t shy away from another way to make a buck.

When an older kid in the neighborhood offered $15 to anyone who would steal four spinner hubcaps for a 1957 Chevy, 15-year-old Eddie Hale leaped at the opportunity.

On a cold winter night, he snuck out of his house. Along with a friend named Leroy Grey, he canvassed the streets until the right car was found. The hubcaps came off easily. With each boy carrying two, they decided to split up.

But the two were not exactly master criminals.

Right away, Eddie Hale violated rule no. 1 for those engaged in the legendary shady enterprise known as Midnight Auto Supply: don’t walk around with the stolen goods in plain sight.

First, a drunk in a pickup truck spotted the skinny kid carrying two shiny hubcaps at 2 in the morning. He chased Eddie and grabbed him from behind, and both slipped on the icy sidewalk. Somehow, Eddie whacked him with a hubcap and took off.

But the get-away was an unmitigated disaster, too.

Hiding behind swamp grass in Bear Creek, he fell through the thin ice up to his ankles. Wet, shivering, with cuts and bruises all over his body, he hid the hubcaps behind a gas station and walked home.

Just as he pulled up to the house, though, so did the cops. They threw him in the back of the squad car and took him back to where he’d tussled with the drunk, now being tended by paramedics. In a scene right out of a sitcom, the beered-up man, grimacing in pain, somehow raised himself from his stretcher when he spotted Eddie and cried “That’s him!” Then he was taken away in an ambulance with neck and back injuries.

Eddie was hauled down to the Dundalk police station and tossed in a cell. His father was called to get him. Not surprisingly, the senior Hale was not in a swell mood after being awakened in the middle of the night to retrieve his son, the budding young hoodlum.

“I have all I can do to keep from mopping up all of Dundalk with you,” he said to the boy, who fully agreed a beating would be justified.

Things did not get a whole lot better for Eddie Hale the next day.

His father insisted that he go to school, despite his late-night “crime spree” and the fact he was working on about two hours sleep. Later that morning, he was summoned over the loudspeaker to the principal’s office. On the way, he noticed several police cars parked in front of the school as well as a familiar-looking ’57 Chevy.

“I’m a dead man,” Eddie thought.

D-E-A-D.

At the very least, he imagined a stint in reform school in his immediate future, with the possibility of all sorts of violent sexual assaults on his person. With the principal and the cops and the car owner staring balefully at him, Eddie Hale caved like a mineshaft and admitted to the theft.

But when the cops asked the Chevy owner if he wanted to press charges, he shook his head and said no.

“Look at him, he’s all beat up,” the man said, pointing at the boy. “Just give me my hubcaps back.”

“The man was smart enough and decent enough to realize it was just a kid making a stupid mistake,” says Hale now. Young Eddie apologized profusely, returned the stolen items and promptly ended his life of crime for good.

Years later, when invited to speak at the commencement exercises for the graduating class of the Baltimore County police academy, Hale would tell the story of his early brush with the law and joke: “If I’d been successful, I probably would have been the Tony Soprano of Maryland.”

But real-life crime czars had a knack for ending up behind bars or in a cemetery with a weeping parent’s tears dampening their headstone. Even at a young age, neither of those prospects held any allure for young Eddie Hale.

As a headstrong kid growing up in a large, boisterous family where money was tight, he was looking for something.

But the life of a bad guy definitely wasn’t it.

Eddie Hale had much bigger plans.