Hale Park Yesterday and Today: Thank You, Frank

© Alane K. Dashner, Explore Lodi

Lodi’s new Downtown Specific Plan outlines the urgent need to improve Hale Park. As we consider Hale Park’s future, let’s pause a moment to consider its past.

Who is Hale Park named after?

Hale Park is named in honor of Frank O. Hale, Lodi’s second Mayor and longtime public servant. By profession, Frank was a funeral director whose mortuary was on the site of today’s Hale Building, 18 West Pine Street.

Frank and his wife, Lizzie, came from Michigan to this area around 1890. With them was their baby girl, Merle. By 1893 Frank is recorded as buying property in Lodi.

Frank Saw Too Much

In 1897 Frank became a partner in the Stockton Undertaking Company and opened a branch of that business in Lodi. By 1901 he was running ads in the Lodi Sentinel under his own business name of “F.O. Hale, Undertaker.”

Bearing witness to tragedy is a professional hazard for funeral directors, and Frank Hale saw more than his share. Besides handling the many bodies killed by farm accidents, drowning, runaway horses, fire, suicide, and childbirth, Frank often saw the darker side of humanity.

Through time Lodi has referred to its transient population by many names, including “hobos,” “vagrants,” “gypsies,” “hippies,” and “homeless.” On a Sunday morning in 1903, “campers” knocked on the Hale front door and calmly handed Frank the emaciated body of their dead five-month-old child. They asked no questions, told him to bury it, and continued on their way. Frank was left to inter the infant using County funds “while [the campers] pursue their nomadic career of going about the country in a wagon.”

Tragedy struck the Hale family in 1899 when the Hales’ eight-year-old son, Don, was playing with a wagon on the sidewalk in front of 21 South Sacramento Street. Somehow he rolled off the sidewalk under the hooves of a tied-up horse, frightening the horse into a plunging and kicking frenzy. Little Don died the next morning without regaining consciousness.

It seems unfair that in 1906 Lodi giggled when Frank was sent to fetch a corpse lying along the train tracks south of town. Just as Frank and two assistants were lifting the body from the ground into a coffin, the “body” awoke and began talking drunkenly. The two assistants ran and Frank “wilted.” The Sentinel gleefully wrote that “Undertaker Hale, of course, sees nothing humorous in the situation.”

“Marry in Haste, Repent at Leisure”

Frank’s other child, Merle, was herself a source of heartache. Merle would have been expected to marry into a well-established family. Instead, in 1906 she eloped with bookkeeper John Scott of the Valley Fruit Company. One imagines Frank gritting his teeth as he welcomed his new son-in-law into the family business, renaming his funeral home Hale & Scott. The “& Scott” dropped off a few years later, followed by Merle’s divorce.

Location, Location, Location

As prosperous as Frank’s funeral home was, it appears that his fortune was made in real estate. He realized early that Lodi would become a desirable town to live in and bought multiple lots in West Oak and Pine Streets as investments.

In 1903 for $425 he bought the lots where Thornton Furniture and the Hale Building stand today. In 1905 he joking offered to sell the Hale Building site for $5,000, and when someone immediately tried to make the deal, he retracted his offer. In 1913 he refused $10,000 for the same small lot. Instead, in 1915 Frank let his old wooden buildings at 18 and 20 West Pine be moved to North Sacramento Street so that he could build the fine brick Hale Building we see today.

Frank’s family home at 323 West Oak Street is still standing today.

Source: Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Lodi, CA. Library of Congress.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

We might expect that Frank’s profession would have made him gloomy. Instead, he was known as a good-natured friend who loved fishing and other outdoor adventures shared with his family and neighbors.

His reputation for genial, steady competence led to Frank’s being elected to Lodi’s first City Council when we incorporated in 1906. Frank was the top vote-getter, and at a time when serving on City Council was unpaid, he served for 24 years straight. Already in 1914 as he reluctantly agreed to run for office again, he said “I am sick and tired of the job.” The City Council punished Frank by making him be Mayor for two terms.

Frank Had a Steady Hand

Frank and the other early City Councilmembers had their hands full trying to invent what the new City of Lodi would look like. They skillfully designed a new set of business licenses and sweet-talked local business owners into compliance. They did their best to calm the arguments between saloon owners and temperance workers who wanted to ban alcohol from Lodi. “I have never been what you would call a dry man,” Frank said diplomatically during Prohibition, “but I believe in upholding the law.”

Frank’s profession gave him special insight into what really matters. In 1916 we built a public swimming pool in what today is called Hale Park, and in 1920 Frank was asked whether the pool had been a good idea. He replied yes, saying that before the pool was built, he buried two or three boys every year who had drowned swimming in the Mokelumne River – one year, five boys. Since the pool opened, not a single boy.

Was Frank Republican or Democrat?

Some sources describe Frank as the most conservative member of the early City Council. Other sources describe him as a progressive leader.

All agree that Frank was famously thrifty, once refusing to pay for a telegram he’d received because he didn’t like what he read. In 1937 as Lodi’s municipal park was renamed Hale Park in honor of Frank Hale’s long service to our community, a fellow Councilmember observed that “Hale served the City conscientiously and well” and that “he was known as the Watchdog of the Treasury.”  

Today, may we remember Frank with appreciation as we restore Hale Park.