OCTOBER 21, 2022 Ocean City Today

SUBMITTED PHOTO Hale Harrison, right, joins artist and sand scupltor Randy Hofman in an undated photo to build — what else? — a hotel on the beach in front of the Plim Plaza, where Hofman has been creating Biblical images since 1981.

Hale Harrison: intensely private, but deeply committed to resort

Continued from Page 1 Decatur High School,” Ocean City attorney and Berlin resident Joe Moore recalled this week.

Moore said he first encountered Hale when he and a group of friends gathered every Sunday night at the Harrison home in Berlin to listen and dance to Elvis Presley records.

In that weekly gathering was Hale’s older sister, Helen, and his cousin Linda Harrison (who went on to gain fame as an actress in movies — the “Planet of the Apes” series — and television).

Moore said the group would be immersed in the music, “when these two little rugrats (Hale and younger brother John) would come out” and start running around.

“Hale would say, ‘If you give us a quarter, we’ll go away.’ Sixty years later, I thought, ‘My God, they knew how to make money when they were kids.”

Harrison’s full immersion in the hotel business began when he dropped out of the University of Maryland in 1969, his senior year, to return home to take over operations of Harrison Hall for his mother, Lois.

His father, G. Hale Harrison, a highly successful local peach producer and businessman, had built the hotel in 1951 as a gift to his wife.

But then, his father died in 1961 when Hale was 14 and that upheaval was followed in the spring by the near ruination of the property during the most destructive storm in Ocean City history: the calamitous March 1962 nor’easter.

Such was the damage and the cost of repairs to the hotel that Mrs. Harrison struggled to keep it open. See HALE Page 4

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