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

by Rosenbaum, Michael

  Still, Korea continued to be a hot war—no peace treaty has ever ended it officially—and Halle’s rifle company operated close to the truce line at the 38th parallel.

  “We were on the main line of resistance, and we were shooting at people and they were shooting at us, trying to blow us out, and we were trying to blow them out,” Halle says. “But we weren’t trying to move them further north, and they weren’t trying to move us further south. It was just a standoff all that time. So, there was artillery and mortar and some rifle fire, but not much direct contact.”

  Along the line of the truce, Sergeant Halle’s rifle company was assigned to replace the Republic of Korea Army at the forward posts—essentially small bunkers spread across the demilitarized zone. Halle’s squad was in the middle, and none of the other bunkers was visible from their location.

  “There were only thirteen of us. I was there for thirty days,” Halle recalls now. “About a week or ten days after we got there, the position next to ours was overrun. I went over there and the guys were all gone. Their boots were lying there and their clothes. They were taken out of there in the middle of the winter and they took them away. I’ll never know what happened to them.”

  The first night in the forward post, Halle and his squad made a near-fatal error. “There was a fire pit and some logs there. Now this was good, we thought. So we started a fire and we’re putting more logs on the fire and we were sitting around and we’re thinking, this is not so bad, and then PING PING PING, they’re shooting at us. They couldn’t really see us, exactly, but they were shooting at the fire. Well, they know we’re there,” he remembers. “Who else but dumb Americans would build a big bonfire there? So, needless to say, we didn’t have any more fires.”

  Potshots from the enemy and the capture of another position reminded the squad that this was a real war zone, so Halle and his men increased their defenses. They set up booby traps of trip wires and hand grenades, tin cans and flares. North Koreans couldn’t surprise them, but rats were another story.

  “We’re lying in the bunker—it was too shallow to stand up—and a big rat ran across my sleeping bag and then across the next guy. Then the rat ran across the third guy’s face and he’s all shook up and mad and he’s got a 45. And BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, the rats are running around and BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, he’s trying to kill the damn things and never did,” Halle says. “After that, everybody is awake, everybody is alert.

  “The rats, by the way—we’d have a candy bar or a piece of bread and we’d wake up in the morning, and the rats had been chewing on all of them,” he continues. “So you’d take your knife and you’d cut out the part they’d bitten and we’d eat the rest of it. That was life in the big city.”

  Halle found time to pray, as most men in uniform will do, as he considered the fragility of his position. “I never got hurt, but I had some close ones, some very close ones,” he recalls. Halle’s close encounters paled in comparison to one member of his squad’s, who had an uncanny knack for drawing mortar fire every time he ventured to the latrine. “Every time Corporal Pierce went to the head, everyone would say, “Get ready for artillery.” It was almost destined; he’d go take a crap and artillery would start coming. You remember the funny things.”

  Halle’s first child, Bruce Jr., was born in September 1952, while Halle was in the line of fire in Korea. Brother Bob, recuperating from his wounds in Michigan, had picked up a letter from Fred and Molly to their son in uniform. On the way to the mailbox, Bob scrawled “It’s a boy” on the back of the envelope and sent it on its way. Bruce Jr. would be six months old before he met his father.

  Halle returned to the States in February 1953, arriving by troop ship in San Francisco and catching a flight to Detroit for a reunion with his family—his wife of nearly two years and their infant son, his parents and the Konfaras. Sgt. Halle had eight months left in the service, but the war was behind him.

  Halle returned to Camp Lejeune much older and wiser than when he had boarded his first plane a year earlier. Still physically fit, he was far more mentally disciplined than he had been when he enlisted at the age of twenty.

  At the base in North Carolina, Halle won a promotion to first sergeant, leading 250 enlisted men, including Sergeant Shipkey—“the toughest Marine I ever knew.” Halle had the good fortune to be one of the men who picked up a truck that had rolled over on Shipkey in Korea—Shipkey was too tough to be injured, of course—and now he was serving under Halle.

  “Now I’m the first sergeant and he’s the gunnery sergeant. He’s the working sergeant and I’m the head office guy,” Halle explains. “When you fall out there in the morning, there’s 250 guys who roll out to roll call and they’re going to work on me. But I’ve got Shipkey standing next to me. They aren’t going to fuck with me. I was the luckiest guy in the world.”

  Halle had gained a deeper sense of people, of trust, and of honor during his time in the service. Always a religious person, he began to see how acts of kindness played out in a more intense environment, and he sought to apply the lessons he learned in his new role as a leader.

  “One of the guys, a private, had gotten into a tango with a sergeant who I knew was still working there,” Halle recalls. “The private had done some brig time and gotten a dishonorable discharge. Well, the MPs bring him to the office and I’m in charge there now and they’ve got this private and he wants to kill the sergeant, and the sergeant is there. I told the private, ‘I’ve got these two MPs here and you’re discharged. You’re getting out. Now I can have them march you out the front gate or I can just dismiss them and let you walk out like a man—if you don’t go see that sergeant. Don’t go talk to him. Just walk out like a man or I’ll have them march you out. Which would you like to do?’ He says, ‘I’ll walk out, Sir, like a man.’ I let the MPs go. He did go out that way, but the sergeant was terrified that this kid was going to kill him. He talked with me and he said, ‘How did you do that?’ But it was just a matter of respect, treating people right.”

  Halle mustered out in September 1953 and returned to Michigan, where he found a job assembling starters and other car parts at Ford’s Rawsonville plant in Ypsilanti and enrolled again at Michigan Normal. Although he had set his sights on becoming a physical education instructor when he first enrolled in 1948, Halle now was determined to focus on a business degree. The successful people he’d met were in business of some sort, and he wanted to be a success.

  “When I came back from the Marine Corps and went back to college, I was a different person than before, when I went to school to begin with. I had been a terrible student. I didn’t apply myself before. I came back after three years in the Marine Corps and I’m an adult. I have grown up. I’m a man,” Halle remembers. “I’m not a little boy going to college out of high school. I’m married. We have a baby. It’s a whole different world and I’m working in a plant. It’s just a whole different world. It’s a growing up time. It’s when you finally … some little light goes on in the back of your head: ‘Get your shit together now.’

  “It does happen and it’s one of the things that I think, danger aside—I think all young men should go into the service. They should go in and get their discipline and get their training and then come back out and start a life somewhere. Most people that you know that have been in the service, injuries aside, they’re much better people than they were before.”

  The newlyweds—plus two years—set up housekeeping in subsidized housing at Willow Run Village in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Rent was $40 per month and electricity was another dollar, but it was still challenging to make ends meet. Halle worked five or six days at the plant and carried a full-time load of classes, adjusting to a work schedule that would serve him well, years later, as the owner of a retail store. Bruce left home at 7:00 a.m. for an 8:00 a.m. class, left school at 2:00 p.m. for a 3:00 p.m. shift at the plant and returned home after 11:00 p.m., only to repeat the same pattern the next day.

  Halle’s work schedule and the challenges of family l
ife wreaked havoc on his academic performance. By the end of the 1953–54 school year, his grades were well below a C average, and Halle was persona non grata at Michigan Normal.

  “Unbeknownst to me, the university had decided I was not going to be allowed to register, but I didn’t know that, so I got registered,” Halle says. “I’m in class, in summer school, and the dean of men calls me. He says I wasn’t supposed to register and I have to leave. Then the dean of irregular programs said I could stay if I quit work and attended school full-time. I told him that would be fine if he would support my family. Finally, we agreed that if I got at least a B in my two summer school classes, I could stay.”

  Halle had nearly missed his high school graduation because he needed more credits in biology and English, and he was taking summer school courses in the same two subjects. He pushed himself hard to get a B in biology but struggled with the interpretive reading class—essentially poetry—that he took with two friends, fellow veterans Dick Adams and Jerry McNally. Halle got lucky again as the teacher had a soft spot for men who had served in uniform.

  “Mrs. Best was the teacher and she was a single, mature lady, and the story was that her lover got killed in World War II and he was the love of her life and she never got married again,” Halle recalls. “So what Dick and Jerry and I did, all the poems that we would read would be war stories, blood, guts and killing and all that stuff. Now, I had picked up malaria in Korea and then, that summer, I had a little relapse. No big deal. All I did was walk to the Veterans Hospital right there outside Ypsilanti and get a few quinine pills and then come back. Well, I missed class the day before and Mrs. Best asked where I was. So Dick and Jerry tell her I got malaria in the war in Korea and I’m out to the hospital and they made it a big story. When I came back the next day, I felt good, but she says, ‘Bruce, put your head down and relax on the table.’ I’d put my head down and doze off and she didn’t care.”

  Halle scored a B in biology and an A in the English class, winning a needed reprieve as a student. Michigan Normal welcomed him back as a junior in the fall of 1954.

  Despite the discipline of the Marine Corps and the demands of his job and family, Halle hadn’t given up on the pranks that provided an extra spark in his life. Halle and three fraternity brothers at Alpha Gamma Epsilon decided it would be funny to kidnap Dick Adams, who had helped him with his English class and was also the president of the fraternity. Halle and his co-conspirators arrived at Adams’s home one evening with a master plan—grab Dick, drive him out to the country and leave him there. The plot unraveled, though, as Dick resisted, his wife began beating Bruce with a broom, and a sheriff’s car rolled up in the midst of the melee. At the Washtenaw County Jail, the lieutenant looked them up and down, listened to their story and asked them how old they were. When Bruce answered that he was twenty-five, the lieutenant suggested that he give some thought to growing up—then let him go.

  In fact, Halle was fully determined to grow up as he shifted his focus to business administration, along with kidnapping co-conspirator Dave Fairbanks. Bruce had reconnected recently with Fairbanks, whom he’d met in an English class when both started school and who also took time out to enlist in the Korean War. Fairbanks was planning to teach accounting in high school and would ultimately become a high school principal—before joining Halle’s young company in 1966.

  “Bruce was always an outgoing individual, one that people could become easily attracted to,” says Fairbanks, now retired and a golf course owner in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Fairbanks remembers that Halle found his niche in classes on salesmanship and the principles of business. “When he was in some of the college classes, I can think of one in particular, if the professor wasn’t sure about an answer, he would call on Bruce,” Fairbanks recalls.

  In spite of his aptitude for business classes and his ability to make friends, Halle was far behind the pace he needed to graduate after four years of schooling. In 1956, eight years after he enrolled at Michigan Normal for the first time, Bruce Halle earned his degree, a bachelor’s of business administration. Bob Halle, two years younger and also a Korea veteran, had nearly caught up with his brother, graduating just a few months later from the same school.

  Bruce Halle was the first person in his family to graduate from college and, despite the challenges of finally earning his degree, he believes he could not have been a success without that start. Today, Discount Tire provides a $5,000 annual college scholarship to any child of a full-time employee with three years at the company, along with smaller grants to other students.

  “I encourage everybody: ‘Go to college. Go to college. Get your degree,’” Halle notes. “One thing that happens, once you get your education and get your degree, that’s yours. No one can take that from you. Some things in life in the future might go bad and you could lose a lot, or most, or all of your worldly possessions, but no one is ever going to take that college degree from you, that education. It’s there. It’s yours forever.”

  Earning a degree was repayment to Sister Marie Ellen for her confidence and to Halle’s parents for their spiritual and financial support. But a degree is only a passport, not a free pass, to success. Bruce Halle, college graduate, was about to take several detours on the road to prosperity.

  FALSE STARTS

  As Bruce Halle struggled to complete his college education and put food on the table for his family, work in the auto plants presented a dead end that had trapped many members of his high school class.

  While he was most conscious of the changes in discipline and focus that he’d gained in the Marine Corps, Halle’s strongest capability was his interpersonal skills. Halle had learned how to find jobs for himself and for friends in high school, how to negotiate a second chance from the deans in college and how to win the support of several polished people he’d met along the way.

  In the work environment at the Ford plant, though, Halle would realize no benefit from his education or his ability to meet people, make friends and earn their trust. As he cast about for alternative ways to make a living, Bruce remembered a couple he and Gerry knew socially. Bruce knew that the husband sold cars. More than that, the husband was making a very good living selling cars. And if he could do it, why couldn’t Bruce T. Halle, soon-to-be college graduate?

  In the fall of 1955, Halle, still a college student, began walking down dealership row on Michigan Avenue in Ypsilanti, offering car dealers his personality, energy and decidedly unproven talent. Employing the same skills that had landed jobs for him and his friends in school, Halle convinced Harry Regetz, general manager of a DeSoto Plymouth dealership, to give him a try—no salary, straight commission. Halle gave his two-week notice at the Ford plant.

  When he returned to the dealership to begin working, however, Regetz was no longer general manager. He’d been demoted to the used car lot and the new general manager, Fred Johnson, had never heard of Bruce Halle or Regetz’s offer. Johnson relented and gave Halle the same deal he’d received from Regetz: Halle would make no money until he sold a car.

  Under pressure to produce, Halle quickly expanded his prospecting well beyond the showroom and personal acquaintances. He would spot a dilapidated car on the road and write down the license plate number. Then, Halle would check the registration of the vehicle, which was an open record at the time, and pay the owner a visit at home. As he developed his pitch and success level, Halle moved on to his next dealership, John Barbour Ford, where his fraternity president and friend, Dick Adams, was already on the sales team.

  “I’d have a customer there and I’d be having a difficult time closing and so I’d say, ‘Excuse me. Let me go get Mr. Barbour and see if he could help us here.’ Dick would come out and I would introduce him as Mr. Barbour. ‘What are you doing here? Can I help you?’ And he would do the same thing. He’d introduce me as Mr. Barbour and we’d move in to close the deal. We were pretty slick guys. We were having fun. And, we were making good money,” Halle remembers. That type of shenanigans would get
a man fired at Discount Tire today, but Halle’s business philosophy was still somewhat more flexible than it would be in later years.

  Working on commission provided the big payoffs that laboring in the auto plants couldn’t offer to the young father. As he’d complete one transaction, he would ask his customers if they knew anyone else who was interested in buying a car, and often they would. One night, Halle met with a couple at 7:00 p.m., sold them a car and, via their referrals, sold two more cars to their neighbors by midnight the same night. That type of success was addictive to a struggling father and college student, and Halle was determined to get more of it.

  Halle and Adams received 20 percent of the first $200 profit the dealership made and then 50 percent of the next $300 of profit, which encouraged the college students to upsell more aggressively.

  “When I was talking to people and they were interested in a car, I’d say to them, ‘Now this is the car we talked about and it’s going to cost you $67 a month. You can afford that. But maybe you want to add something to it or go to a little bit better model. For $75 a month, for $7 more, you could have this.’ People would say that would be kind of cool. Well, you took $7 times thirty-six months and that’s a lot of money. And I got half of it. So, I was making a lot of money,” Halle remembers.

  Halle earned $11,600 selling cars in 1956, the year he graduated from Michigan Normal. At the time, the price of a new home was approximately $11,700 and the average U.S. worker was earning less than $4,500.

  As car sales paid off, Bruce and Gerry gained financial security. Gerry had been keeping the family finances in line, much as Bruce’s mother had done, as he relied on a GI Bill benefit of about $110 per month and wages at the Ford plant. Now, as sales commissions multiplied the family’s earnings, Gerry socked away the extra dollars for a down payment on a home.