6 Tires, No Plan : The Impossible Journey of the Most Inspirational Leader That (Almost) Nobody Knows (9781608322589)

by Rosenbaum, Michael

  Along with the nuns and Father Curran, Fred and Molly Halle immersed their children in Catholic ritual and thought. The routines of the household provided a strong perception of values and religious observance to the Halle children.

  “Until he passed away, my dad always knelt at his bed at night and said prayers. He always did. Mom did too,” Bruce Halle remembers. “They were religious people and, according to standards then, they lived that way. We had a beautiful childhood. There were no problems, no fights and no drunkenness, no swearing. It was a beautiful family. I think we were very blessed.”

  For a boy in grade school, religious instruction is seldom about the intricacies of dogma. Bruce Halle remembers only the generally positive precepts delivered by his parents, Father Curran and the nuns at St. Kieran’s, but the lessons were internalized forcefully in Halle’s mind. The simple lessons of common courtesy, the Golden Rule and charity would become a critical source of Halle’s lifetime success.

  “Even though we had five kids at that time and Dad was just a fireman, we were better off than some of our neighbors,” he recalls. “I remember a movie was ten cents and we’d go, but the Hogan family across the street was a bigger family than ours. Mom and Dad would give Fred and Bob and me a dime to go and then, on occasion, they’d give us an extra dime so we could each take a Hogan kid. A dime was a lot in those days.”

  Catherine Kearns McKelvey, Molly’s mother, died after a brief illness in 1937, and was laid out on a bier in the McKelvey house on Third Avenue. The sight of his grandmother unnerved six-year-old Bruce, who spent as much time as he could outside the house, sitting on a sled in the February chill, hoping the ordeal would end soon. His father’s mother, Mary, tried to comfort him, but her words had no effect on the frightened boy.

  The loss of her mother left Molly as the caretaker of seven men: her own five sons, her husband and, now, her father. While Fred Halle avoided alcohol—keeping a promise he made to Molly when they married—Bruce and his brothers learned about demon rum from their grandfather. John Patrick McKelvey, retired from the paper mill, was an energetic member of the Moose Lodge in Berlin and, too often, an overly enthusiastic participant in their Friday night festivities.

  “On Friday nights, he used to go to the Moose Club and he’d come home with too much beer and invariably, Grandpa, going upstairs to the second floor, would fall down,” Bruce Halle remembers. “Mom would call us and Fred Jr. and I would go and help Grandpa get up and make sure he made it.”

  Not yet a teenager, Bruce earned sips of beer from his grandfather in return for simple chores. “My grandfather was the only one in the house that drank,” he recalls. “Of course, because of him, I got to have a beer once in a while because I’d help him break his tobacco up for his pipe and he would give me a taste of his beer.”

  Besides carrying their grandfather upstairs, the boys had more mundane chores. Although there was a pump behind the house on Third Avenue, Bruce and his brothers were responsible for pulling their wagon, filled with glass containers, up the street to the base of Mount Forist, where a freshwater spring provided clean water for drinking and cooking.

  “It was a different time. There were no children challenging the parents,” Halle remembers. “Mom and Dad were in charge, they were the bosses, and we were all pretty well-behaved little kids. When necessary, Dad would punish. He’d spank, which was common. He didn’t kill us. We all lived. It was a different time, and you didn’t challenge your parents. You obeyed.”

  Of course, Bruce and his brothers didn’t always obey. Like most youngsters, they looked for new excitement each day, and Berlin offered more opportunity for exploration and fun than any modern theme park. In addition to the movie theater and the scout troop that Fred Halle and Father Curran led, the boys had Mount Forist.

  Mount Forist, two thousand feet high and enticing, stood a few hundred feet beyond the McKelveys’ back yard. Although their father and Father Curran would take the boys skiing on the mountain, the strict rule was never to go up on the mountain alone.

  “First thing in the morning, Mom and Dad said, ‘Don’t go up in the mountain,’ so that’s of course where we went, and we’d pick blueberries,” Bruce Halle remembers. “So we’d come back down the mountain and Mom and Dad would know we were there because we had blue tongues and blue lips.”

  The boys also ignored the strict rules against ringing doorbells and running away on Halloween, hopping on and off the freight trains rolling slowly through town, and walking along the railroad tracks on the way to school. Whenever the boys misbehaved, Molly would direct Fred regarding the appropriate punishment. “Wait until your father gets home” was more than an idle threat.

  “Spankings were in the mode then, and my dad knew how to do that, but my brothers and I earned them all, so there was no problem,” Bruce Halle says today.

  As Halle looks back on his days in Berlin, he remembers simply having a great time. The world was frightening for families who couldn’t make ends meet, but life was just plain fun for a boy surrounded by his brothers and friends and a dad who was the most entertaining guy in the world. The Halle boys, including the biggest boy in the pack—Fred Sr.—knew how to have a good time.

  As the 1930s drew to a close, Fred’s good times—scouting, playing Santa, singing, coaching boxers—kept him away from the house for extended hours. Fred Jr. was gone much of the time as well, seeking part-time jobs. Increasingly, Bruce began to transition into a new role, becoming the man of the house when his father wasn’t around.

  “Bruce was the one who took over with the children,” said his cousin, Charlotte Fournier. “He wasn’t the oldest, but he fell into that situation.”

  Eventually, Bruce’s chores came to include dispensing spankings to his younger brothers.

  “Other than Dad, I was Mom’s rock,” Bruce says. “I was there to help her manage the rest of the kids and I used to do that. In fact, I remember having to punish my brothers. I forget what they did, but it doesn’t matter. I would do it for Mom. ‘Take these kids downstairs and square them away.’ It was fair. It didn’t hurt them. They survived.”

  While spankings were doled out on a strictly-business basis, Bruce developed a bad temper as a youngster that took many years to outgrow. People who know the adult Bruce Halle might not recognize the child he had been.

  “When I was a kid, I had a terrible temper. I was a little shithead,” Halle says now, “and I deserved some of the things I got. I don’t know if I was mad about something. I just had a temper.”

  Bruce and Fred Jr. fought regularly, although the fighting was both a form of competition and a way of having fun. Bruce was younger, but he was large for his age, so the two brothers were evenly matched. As Bruce bested his brother in many of their fights, the competition often grew more severe between the two. Even though the fights got out of hand from time to time, battling between brothers was considered normal, unlike Bruce’s bursts of anger with others outside the family.

  “I’d just spout off and I’d do things,” Bruce remembers. “I hit the girl next door, Doreen Piper, who was my age and a classmate, and one day, for some reason, I slapped her. She went crying home to her parents and her parents told my dad and I learned I shouldn’t do that. I never did it again.”

  While Bruce was overwhelmed at times by his own temper, he and his siblings never recall seeing their father swearing or striking out in anger. Spankings were a job Dad had to do, but Bruce Halle recalls that “it was just business.”

  At the same time, Fred Halle didn’t take crap from anyone, especially when his family was involved. One Christmas, the family was driving out into a wooded area to find a tree to bring home for Christmas. The story has improved with age. The owner of a nearby house was armed with either an axe or a shotgun when he came on to his porch and started swearing at Molly and the children.

  “Maybe we were on his property,” Bruce Halle guesses. “But he’s yelling and swearing at my mother and us just as Dad is coming out
of the woods with this Christmas tree that he just chopped down. Dad walked right up to the porch to him. I never heard him say ‘damn.’ He just didn’t. But Dad wouldn’t take that from anybody. So Dad goes on up on the porch and hits that guy two or three times and that was the end of that.”

  In 1939, Fred Halle was promoted to deputy chief of the Berlin Fire Department and life settled into a pleasant pattern for the natural-born entertainer. As the 1940s dawned, though, the family was about to experience another major upheaval, one that would send Bruce and his family into very different worlds.

  By December 1941, when the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor heralded the beginning of World War II, the Halles had just welcomed their sixth child into the world—Mary Ellen was born earlier that year. As the United States shook off decades of isolationism to confront its new enemies, Congress authorized the conscription of all able-bodied men aged eighteen and older. At thirty-eight years old, Fred thought he might be exempted from the draft as a consequence of having six children to care for, but his hopes were futile. Fred would be drafted and his family would most likely be destitute—relying on cousins and friends in Berlin for basic sustenance.

  Just as the McKelvey family had taken the Halles in during the Great Depression, a McKelvey came through again for Fred. A cousin of Molly’s worked in the personnel department at Ford Motor Company and Ford was a defense contractor. Civilians employed in critical defense roles could avoid the draft, and Ford’s Rouge River plant needed security guards. Fred and his family could stay together through the war, but only if they moved to the Motor City.

  Fred Halle packed as much as he could stuff into his old Chevrolet sedan and left Berlin for his new job. Fred Jr., too young to be drafted but old enough to find odd jobs, struck out on his own and would not rejoin the family for more than a year. Bruce, barely a teen, assumed the parental role that would not naturally fall to a second son. As the family prepared to board a train for Detroit, Bruce Halle was the de facto man of the house. It would be his job to keep the rest of the children in line as Molly carried the household six hundred miles from her hometown to the unknown.

  BRAVE NEW WORLD

  For more than a decade, essentially all of Bruce’s life thus far, the Halles had been sheltered by the close network of their extended families in Berlin. Mass at St. Kieran’s, the view of Mount Forist from the McKelvey home and even the smell of the paper mills provided the comfortable sense of belonging. Now, that life was ending.

  Fred’s departure in the family car left Molly and Bruce to cope with the challenges of moving household goods, clothing and four younger children. The Halles had no luggage, but a friend at a local mortuary found some old casket boxes for their household goods. Molly said good-bye to her father, hugged her cousins and boarded the train to her new life, with four sons and a baby girl in tow. A few months after her relocation to Detroit, Molly’s father would have a fatal stroke. She would be unable to return to attend the funeral.

  The train ride to Detroit was a life-changing experience for Bruce Halle, who was playing the role of dad to his brothers and sister. Mary Ellen, born in 1941, was still in diapers and Molly was pregnant with her last child, Elizabeth Louise, who would be born in Detroit.

  Molly and the children stopped overnight in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Fred and Molly had moved shortly after their wedding in 1927. Molly wanted to spend time with Harold and Louise LaFleck, who had befriended the young couple and became Bruce’s godparents. While the family was in Springfield, Molly bought Bruce his first pair of slacks, a rite of passage from the overalls and knickers he had been wearing when he was a boy in Berlin. The symbolism of young Bruce, suddenly wearing the pants in the family, was notable.

  The move and train ride were an adventure for Bruce, who relished his role as the alpha male in the entourage. As the family collected its possessions and left the train in Detroit, a new world presented itself to a boy whose greatest adventure thus far had been the forbidden Mount Forist. While Berlin was a fair-sized town in 1942, Detroit was already a metropolis. Coming off the train in Detroit was like awakening in the Land of Oz.

  “Living in that little town in New Hampshire, I had never seen a black man, I had never seen an alley behind a house, I’d never seen a street car, I’d never seen a building more than three or four stories high,” Halle recalls today. “I was a rube from the country, I really was.”

  Fred had rented a house at Calvary and McMillan on the southwest side of Detroit, just a few blocks from the Holy Redeemer church and school. It was the first time in more than a decade that Fred Halle would be providing the roof over his own household.

  Security work at Ford kept Fred out of the army, but it didn’t put enough food on the table for a family of eight. Fred took on additional jobs and the family scraped by as each of the older children took on added chores.

  “We were a family doing what we could with food stamps—war stamps—and going to the store for my mother,” remembers Bob Halle, the third-oldest brother.

  The family settled into its traditional patterns in Detroit, with Fred working two or three jobs and Molly finding a way to stretch the budget. As had been the case in Berlin, Bruce also took on the disciplinarian role when Fred wasn’t home, which was most of the time. As Fred struggled to keep the family fed, Molly called on Bruce to fill in the gaps.

  In Berlin, Bruce could walk with his brothers and father to the firehouse, feeling like a big kid while he carried Fred’s lunch pail. At the firehouse, he and his brothers could slide down the pole or climb on the truck. In Detroit, Fred’s work was less visible to his adolescent son. Molly’s work, however, was starkly apparent as she struggled to manage her overloaded household. The burden was overwhelming at times. In class one day at Neinas Elementary School, Bruce was setting type in an industrial arts class when he looked out the window and saw his baby sister, Betty, toddling down the street, naked. He dashed out of the building to grab her and bring her home, facing merciless ribbing upon his return to class.

  Bruce enrolled in 1944 as a freshman at Holy Redeemer High School, a few blocks from the family’s rented home. Bruce settled into the Catholic education system easily, but mixing with other ethnic groups was more challenging in the highly diverse community.

  “We’d have disagreements like all kids and we’d have some fights and little mini-gang wars, but not gang wars like today,” Halle says. “I remember in little gang wars, we’d have to run and hide from another group chasing us because our group was small at that time, until we got some support. It was just amazing. I remember running into movie theaters and hiding in there and hoping to come out when they’re not there and running home. It was just a way of life.”

  Fitting in was somewhat easier at Holy Redeemer, where Bruce’s strength and size proved to be an admission ticket. He joined the football, basketball and track teams, just as his father had done at Berlin High School, and felt at home as part of the teams. That camaraderie and his comfort with Catholic school tied Bruce closely to Holy Redeemer, which created a new challenge for the family when Fred could finally afford to buy a house.

  In 1945, as World War II was coming to a close and the GIs surged home, pent-up demand from the Depression and war years was unleashed and suburbia beckoned. In 1946, Fred Halle found a house for his family at 7750 Huron Street in Taylor Township, about thirteen miles from Detroit. The American Dream of home ownership was finally in reach, if only he could qualify for a mortgage. Again, one of Molly’s family members came to the rescue.

  “George Jenkins lived not too far from where this new house was and George and his wife, Harriet—she was a cousin of Mom’s—helped my mom and dad qualify for a mortgage,” Bruce remembers. “He must have cosigned or something like that and we bought this house, which was two blocks away from where they lived.”

  While the family had grown up together in Berlin and Detroit, the move to Taylor Township would send several of the children on diverging
paths. In Berlin, all the Halle children would attend the same grade school and high school. In Taylor Township, which had no high school at the time, the arrangements were more complicated. Ultimately, Bruce, Bob, Jim and Alan would all attend different high schools, as would Fred Jr., who joined the family after a stint in the Merchant Marine and before joining the Marine Corps.

  Mary Ellen, still a preschooler when the family moved to Taylor, saw her home life as normal, just as Bruce had described his own life in Berlin. Mom and Dad were quietly religious, leading by example. Dad was seldom home, but he taught Mary Ellen to dance, and they had great fun. Mom kept the house intact and “was the glue that held the family together.”

  When the family unpacked and settled into their new home, Bruce was beginning his junior year at Holy Redeemer High School. He had made friends on the athletic teams and thrived—socially, if not academically—in the Catholic education system. He wanted to continue at Holy Redeemer and his parents, true believers, were willing to make the investment to keep him there.

  In fact, Fred and Molly had thought their third son, Bob, might become a priest. He was studious, quieter than his older brothers and more thoughtful, less instinctive. Taylor Township offered no Catholic high school options, however, and high school was still a year away for Bob, in any event.

  “The tuition at Holy Redeemer High School, when you were in parish, was $20 a semester,” according to Bruce, but “out of the parish it was $40. That was a lot of money, but my mom and dad paid that and I stayed there. I didn’t realize it then, but that might have been one of the most life-changing decisions I ever made.”

  Getting to school from the family’s new home was a logistical challenge. Bruce would walk to the bus stop and catch the bus to the streetcar stop on Fort Street. The streetcar stopped at Junction, about a mile from Holy Redeemer, leaving him to walk the final blocks to school. Hitchhiking was common at the time, and Halle would often thumb a ride to save the dime it cost to take the streetcar.