Like his older brother, Bruce began looking for part-time jobs to help cover his expenses, and he proved to be adept at finding employment. During the course of his high school years, he would find work as diverse as cutting grass at Holy Cross Cemetery, developing film at Cunningham’s Drug Store, delivering packages by bicycle at a Kaiser-Frazer car plant and, wearing a blood-stained smock, standing guard behind the meat truck while Molly’s cousin, George Moore, made deliveries to grocery stores. The word wasn’t in common usage at the time, but Bruce Halle had become something of a schmoozer. In the summer, he applied his skills to find work not only for himself, but for high school friends as well.
Between his classes, athletics and part-time jobs, Bruce was seldom home and, much like his father, sleeping more than awake when he was with his family. One night, sleep deprived and returning from a practice, Bruce fell asleep at the wheel of his father’s 1937 Dodge.
“I went off the side of the road and there were telephone poles around me and I swerved,” Halle says. “Fenders weren’t part of the body, so the right front fender comes off and part of the running board, but it ran. The radiator was broken and I wasn’t that far from the house. I got home and dropped the car in front of the house. It’s Saturday night. Dad gets up in the morning and goes out to take the rest of the family to church. I’m sleeping and he comes in and wakes me up: ‘What happened to the car?’ And I told him. He said, ‘Did anybody get hurt?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ That’s all he said. Nobody got hurt.”
The car sat in front of the house for weeks while Bruce scraped up the money to have the radiator fixed and his father cadged rides or hitchhiked to work. The car was Fred’s mobility and he couldn’t afford to replace it, but he didn’t really care much. Years later, Bruce would show little emotional attachment to most of his possessions, including cars, as he took his father’s example to heart.
“Dad was out of the car for a long while, but he never really said anything else to me about it. His question was, ‘Did anybody get hurt?’ That’s it. Not many people are that calm under those situations and he was terrific that way. I’ll never forget that.”
THE POLISHED PEOPLE
As the family settled into its normal life in Taylor Township, Bruce Halle became a dual citizen of Taylor and Detroit. Between commuting, sports, school and part-time jobs, Halle was off on his own almost as much as Fred and Fred Jr. Away from family most of the time, he began to notice another part of the world.
“When I was in high school, there were a number of classmates whose parents had a business. There were Terry and Denny McGovern. Their parents had a funeral home right there in the neighborhood, McGovern’s funeral home. Then there was a girl and, right there in the neighborhood, her parents had a little potato chip factory. They had a brand name and they packaged them and that kind of thing. I remember thinking how lucky those guys were. Their parents had businesses,” Halle remembers.
Similarly, the Kelly brothers at Holy Redeemer came from a family that owned a successful restaurant. While most students would take the streetcar to school, the Kelly boys would often drive. “Once in a while I’d get lucky and they’d give me a ride in the car. After football practice when they had the car, we’d pull over to their father’s restaurant and we’d go down in the cellar and get a beer. It was so cool. I think the old man probably knew it, but we just went and had one beer and then we went back and showered and went home,” Halle says.
Even more impressive than beer in the restaurant basement was a new invention called television. Halle had been listening to boxing matches on radio since he was a child in Berlin, but one of the upperclassmen at the school, Bill DiDonato, had a television set in his home—one of roughly 2,500 television sets in the Detroit area at the time. The cathode ray tube was about the size of the iPad Halle carries today, but the experience of seeing things he could only hear as a child was dramatically exciting for the self-described rube from New Hampshire.
The contrast between people who owned a business and those who merely worked for someone else’s company began to etch itself in Halle’s mind. “My father was working at the Ford plant, you know, and these people were a different level than we were,” he thought.
In Berlin, the Alfred Halle & Son butcher shop was the only example of a family business close to Bruce’s life, but his father had left that business behind long before Bruce was born. Bruce had thought his grandfather, Wilfred Halle, was a cool guy and a cut above some of the other adults he met, but he was too young to think of his grandfather in terms of business ownership. In the working-class neighborhoods where the Halles lived in Michigan, everyone worked at the Ford plant—unless they worked for GM. Blue-collar dads raised blue-collar sons. It was that simple.
“Most guys that graduated from high school in Detroit did that,” Halle remembers. “They’d become policemen or firemen or went to work in the plants—General Motors, Cadillac, Ford, all of them were there. Those were good jobs.”
While good, blue-collar jobs were available in the auto plants and cop houses of Detroit, Halle began to notice that there were other jobs as well. In high school, Bruce started paying attention not only to the people who owned businesses, but also those who were performing more professional, white-collar jobs. One such professional was a neighbor, Carl Hansen, who had learned of Bruce’s commute to Holy Redeemer and offered to drive him to school in the mornings.
“I’d get up, and Carl lived a couple of doors down, and I’d just walk down and get in his car, and we’d go to school. It was great,” Halle says. “I was lucky. I think that the man had charm and polish and taste. He was a quality guy. He had more education than anybody in my family and he was an engineer,” Halle says now. Halle cannot remember what kind of engineer Hansen was, but it was clear there was more career opportunity in the world than working in the car plants. To Halle, Carl Hansen was one of the people who was polished and elegant, a cut above the level that had been the norm for Halle until then.
The rides to work helped Halle win support from some of the nuns at Holy Redeemer. Hansen left for work early in the morning, dropping Halle off outside school ten to fifteen minutes before morning Mass. Halle had nothing else to do at that time of day, so he would sit in the chapel to warm up from the chill. The nuns, though, saw his early arrival as a sign that he was simply one of the more committed Catholics in the school.
While Bruce Halle was discovering the world of people who owned businesses and the “polished people” with white-collar jobs, he also became much more aware of girls. Holy Redeemer had been teaching boys and girls in separate classes since its founding, but classes were combined in the fall of 1944. On the first day of his freshman year, Halle had spotted the girl who would become his wife of thirty-eight years.
“I was near the back and I looked over and in the first row, by the window, in the second seat, is Gerry. I thought she was very cute,” Halle says. Geraldine Konfara was several months older than Bruce, just as his own mother was seven months older than his father. Gerry’s father worked in the same plant as Fred Halle and the two men knew each other, although they were not social friends. Gerry’s background was as working class as Bruce’s, but she seemed to have the wiser perspective more prevalent among the polished people.
Bruce and Gerry didn’t begin dating until junior year, after his family moved to Taylor, but they got to know each other before then through the Blue Room, a set of high-school dances supervised by the nuns at Holy Redeemer. Gerry was going steady with a student one year older than she, so Bruce’s opportunity didn’t open up fully until Gerry’s beau graduated at the end of their junior year.
Although Bruce and Gerry dated other people during high school and college, Bruce saw something special in Gerry, something that reminded him of his mother. The two were not physically similar, but both seemed to be smarter, more sophisticated, more elegant—“squared away,” in Bruce’s words.
Bruce Halle never believed he was quite the
equal of the elegant, polished people he’d meet from time to time. He saw his mother as a person who could exist comfortably in both worlds, and he thought of Gerry in much the same way.
Halle loved and respected his father and believed in him as a hardworking provider, but he saw his mother as someone who needed and deserved a bit more protection and support than she had received thus far in her life. One Christmas, Bruce saved up a few dollars from his part-time jobs and by hitchhiking to school instead of taking the streetcar, and he bought his mother a purse. Not just a purse. THE PURSE. It was leather and it was the nicest purse, possibly the nicest gift, she had ever received.
The experience of giving a gift with so much impact was life-changing for Halle, engendering a lifelong habit of seeking gifts that would create a similar effect with recipients. Halle has given millions of dollars in gifts since then, but the item he speaks of most frequently, and with the greatest pride, is the leather purse he bought for his mom roughly sixty-five years ago.
Halle had learned to enjoy giving rather than receiving, and he had internalized the teachings of his parents and the Church, but the still-immature teenager had yet to shake some of the bad habits that had led him into trouble as a boy. Halle found it fun, from time to time, to catch mice in the cemetery where he cut the grass and release the vermin on the streetcar. Those pranks were minor, however, in comparison to the unpredictable temper that continued to overwhelm Halle at times.
“One time when Fred Jr. was still home, I was at the kitchen table having dinner. Fred was across the table. We’re having some bad words,” Halle remembers. “There was a roast beef there and there was a knife here, and I threw the knife at Fred. I was no knife thrower. It just hit him blunt and Dad was sitting there. Dad was a pretty big man and he just went whap to me and I went flying into the other room, chair spinning over.”
The aggression between brothers—almost always Bruce and Fred Jr.—was an ongoing story in the Halle household. Their competition became decidedly more public in 1948, when the two man-boys met for The Fight.
Nobody, including Bruce Halle, can quite explain the circumstances that led to the final confrontation between Fred Halle’s two oldest sons. The Battle of Huron Street was a grudge match, to be sure, but it’s not clear what the grudge was about or when it was over.
From the beginning, in Berlin, Fred Jr. and Bruce stood in awe of their father’s pugilistic dexterity. Fred Halle was bigger than life to the boys and nothing made him quite so big as his boxing talents. He taught his sons to box at an early age and, even at the preteen level, Bruce and Fred Jr. had developed a substantial rivalry. As is the case with most brothers, there was both love and hate involved.
In high school, Bruce helped his brother push their father’s car down the street so Fred Jr. could go for a joy ride with friends without his dad hearing the car start. When Fred Jr. married outside the Catholic faith, Fred and Molly would not attend the wedding in a Methodist Church, but Bruce and Bob traveled down to Owensboro, Kentucky to stand up with their brother.
Although his parents were dismayed, Bruce took a more pragmatic view of his brother’s choice. “That marriage was such a ‘disaster’ that Fred and Jane were married for fifty years before Jane passed away,” he says with a smile.
Coexisting with the unbreakable bond between the brothers, the battle for boxing supremacy remained an open wound. In 1948, Fred Halle Jr. came home from the Marine Corps to visit his family in Taylor Township. Bruce was a senior at Holy Redeemer High School, still stronger than his older brother, but Fred Jr. had been boxing in the Marines and won his division championship at Parris Island. At home, trash talk turned into a challenge and the battle was joined.
“He kicked the shit out of me,” Bruce Halle admits.
The brothers put on their gloves and began fighting in the backyard. Bruce was bigger, but Fred Jr. was much faster and more agile. For every punch Bruce landed, Fred Jr. countered with three or four. The fighting continued in the backyard, then the front yard, and neighbors gathered to watch as Fred Jr. and Bruce thrashed their way across the street. The women stopped watching, disgusted by the violence, but the men stared at the unfolding armageddon.
Finally, in the vacant lot across the street, the brothers ended up on the ground, wrestling and throwing more punches. “I’m bleeding and it finally ends up as a wrestling match, and I get Fred on the ground and blood is pouring out of my nose and it’s filling his eye sockets. That drove him crazy.”
It’s not completely clear which man ended the fight, but it was definitely agreed that Fred Jr. was the winner.
“One of his goals was to come back and beat the shit out of his little brother and he did. He did a good a job of it, too,” Bruce Halle remembers. “It was fun. It was a great match and we talked about that for years afterwards and it was good. It was part of family and part of growing up with a bunch of boys in that time frame.”
Flush with victory, Fred Jr. moved on to a greater challenge: Fred Halle Sr. Big mistake.
“Dad was a better boxer than me, and he was a faster and bigger man than Fred. So they’re fighting in the kitchen and Fred couldn’t match Dad and Dad finally said, ‘That’s enough of that.’ He hits Fred in the chest really hard and Fred goes through the door and lands on the steps going down. He broke the door and my mother wanted to kill my father. Dad didn’t know which way to hold a screwdriver, so I said, ‘Mom, I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it.’ She was going to kill those two guys.”
Fred Jr. proved his point to Bruce. Fred Sr. proved his point to Fred Jr. Nobody died. The end. For Bruce Halle, recollections of The Battle of Huron Street fit into the pattern of most memories. If it was a good experience, it was neat or cool. If the experience was challenging, it was just the way things were. Strictly business. As that way of thinking would become the norm over time, Halle would establish a leadership style that would be highly attractive to thousands of followers.
In 1948, the year of the fight and Halle’s graduation from Holy Redeemer, the world was not quite so orderly. As Bruce graduated and prepared to begin college, Fred’s earnings from multiple jobs proved inadequate for the still-packed household.
Molly and Fred helped Bruce with his college expenses and both Bruce and Bob would ultimately complete college on the GI Bill, but the family finances offered less opportunity for Fred and Molly’s other children. As Bruce left for college, Molly left home each day to earn a living.
“I was fortunate. My mother had to go to work later and that had a big effect on my brothers and sisters. Up until the time that I graduated high school, Mom didn’t have to go to work,” Halle remembers.
Molly’s first job, working in a cafeteria at a car plant, was not the best fit, but office work proved to be a good match for the socially adept, though quiet, mother of seven. Molly’s math skills were of significant value in an office environment and she proved to be an excellent employee. Still, in the late 1940s, a working wife was not a positive reflection on a husband as the provider to a family.
“I can’t look at my dad as a failure,” Bruce says, “but it was sad that my mother had to go to work for many years.” Bruce was influenced strongly by the daily challenges his mother faced. Even if he didn’t know it yet, he was determined that that his own wife would have a better life than his mom’s.
Returning to the workforce was not the final challenge for Molly, however. Fred’s mother moved to Michigan after her husband died, taking up residence with Fred’s sister, Stella Hughes. When the family matriarch visited the Halle home on Huron Street, the old French-Canadian widow enjoyed conversing with her son—in French.
“In the house, when we lived in Michigan, Grandma would talk French to Dad and Dad would, of course, answer his mother,” Halle remembers. Intentionally, the conversations were indecipherable to Molly, the Irish girl who had stolen Frederick J. Halle from his family back in Berlin.
THE SPEECH
Bruce Halle’s horizons expanded as he completed h
is education at Holy Redeemer High School. As he adapted to his new surroundings, he learned to survive in a cauldron of feuding ethnic groups and find jobs to bring in the spare change essential to any teenager’s life. Meeting people whose parents owned a business, he recognized a path to prosperity he had never known of in Berlin. Riding to school with Carl Hansen, he considered the doors that could open for a man with a bit of the elegance and class Bruce had yet to attain. Looking at Gerry and at his own mother, he realized there were people who could cross over from his world into the world of the polished people, a world where he wouldn’t quite fit without a passport or a guide.
None of these thoughts was a burning notion at the time. It would be simplistic to suggest that the teen’s exposure to different types of people lit an all-consuming passion that drove him to success. Still, a small flame had been lit, a flame that would grow.
Despite all the options he saw as he looked around his expanding universe, one critical piece was missing. Halle was a good athlete, but not a great one. He was a passable student, in the literal sense of that term, but he recognized himself as forty-ninth runner-up for valedictorian in a class of fifty. He got along well with most people, when his temper didn’t derail him, but he wasn’t a natural leader.
While he could see that other people had found paths to great success—from owning businesses to professional careers—he didn’t see any of those paths leading to success for Bruce Thomas Halle.
Sister Marie Ellen provided that vision.
Sister Marie Ellen belonged to the Immaculate Heart of Mary order that had taken over responsibility for educating all students at Holy Redeemer High School in Bruce Halle’s freshman year. The order was founded in 1845 in Monroe, Michigan, by Father Louis Gillet and Sister Theresa Maxis, and Holy Redeemer Parish opened its high school in 1897. For more than four decades, boys and girls attended separate schools. The Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters taught the girls and the Brothers of Mary taught the boys. In 1944, Bruce Halle’s freshman year, the Brothers of Mary left the school and classes were combined.
6 Tires, No Plan : The Impossible Journey of the Most Inspirational Leader That (Almost) Nobody Knows (9781608322589) Page 4