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.
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