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.
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