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He was born to Chester D. and Mary “Mollie� (Huckstep) Hale on Dec. 26, 1878, in Salina, Kansas. His father, a former Union soldier, worked as a wagon maker and had a shop. His mother was a homemaker. Another form of income for the family came in 1880 when the parents sold a piece of property for $1,000, which is approximately $27,000 today. Millard’s sisters Maud and Clara and brother Ralph joined the family in the decade after his birth.

Around the turn of the century, Millard attended Kansas Wesleyan University and the Saline County Teachers Institute in order to obtain a teacher’s certificate for the county schools. During college he worked as a night clerk at the Union Pacific depot in or near his hometown.

In 1906, his father died of consumption, which was likely aided by Bright’s disease, in the family home, with Millard and the other family members by his side. For the next few years, Millard Hale appears to have worked as a carpenter in home construction in Salina.

In 1911, he made his first known visit to ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, likely by train, and stayed at the Hotel Heidel (now The Mac Arthur Building) on Toole Avenue.

He didn’t stay long, though, heading instead down to Sinaloa, Mexico, to work as an overseer with his younger brother Ralph on a sugar plantation, even though it was in the midst of the Mexican Revolution.

The brothers worked for an American planter south of the border who paid local workers 33 cents a day, at this time and area, one of the higher wages to be obtained for unskilled laborers.

During their time in Mexico there was a battle, believed to be near the sugar plantation, between rebel forces and federal soldiers that began at 11 o’clock one morning and ended at 6 o’clock that evening. After the smoke cleared, the death toll was counted and found to be one mule and one donkey. Neither side could claim victory.

The brothers explained in an interview: “... the Mexican method of warfare is entirely different from ours. They will fight a battle and then rest for several weeks while the winning side gloats over the victory and celebrates with the great pomp and such splendor as they can afford.�

In 1914, with the U.S. government urging Americans to leave Mexico and offering to pay for passage back to the country, the brothers arrived at Los Mochis, Sinaloa, on the west coast. They were taken aboard a gun boat and are believed to have been taken to the port city of Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico and then transferred to the SS Mazatlan which carried them to San Diego. From there, they took a train back to Kansas.

By mid-1917, Millard and Ralph Hale were back to working on a sugar plantation, this time near Nogales, Sonora. Ralph was the first to return to Old Mexico and wrote to Millard that everything was booming there and it was a splendid place to live, so he returned.

The following year, Millard Hale returned to the U.S. and registered in Nogales, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, for the World War I draft. His registration card lists him as tall, with blue eyes and brown hair. His occupation was listed as carpenter but at present he was unemployed.

In 1920, Hale sold property in Salina, likely to gain money for a new house. The following year, he was residing with his mother at 360 N. Highland Avenue in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥.

It’s believed around the early 1920s that Hale worked as a carpenter on the Harold Bell Wright house located on Speedway and Wilmot Road.

By 1923, he was married to Lydia Fowler Hale and living at 909 E. Ninth St. That year son Robert “Bobby� Hale was born, but his mother died during his birth.

Around the same time Hale met Fern Iden, a Kansas girl who had come to ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ to teach English at ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ High School. Fern had been put in contact with Hale’s mother through her church in Kansas, and had come out West with her support.

Soon after, Hale left for Prescott to find employment. In 1925, Fern joined him in Prescott and they wed. They soon packed up their Model T and headed back to the Old Pueblo.

The following year baby George C. Hale was born at the Stork’s Nest in downtown ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥. Around this time, Millard Hale purchased a two-bedroom home for $40 a month at 218 N. Third Avenue. Three years later they began to rent it out.

In 1929 he bought a five-acre plot, in the sticks on the south side of town, and put his carpentry skills to work constructing another two-bedroom home.

Fern recalled years later in a letter, “For the first few days we had hardly any furniture and no electricity. We even carried water from our next-door neighbors well. Millard hired two Indians to dig a well 65 feet deep. Then he bought a used windmill and a 7,500-gallon water tank. All alone he put up the windmill. Then he built a ramp 30 feet high, tied a cable to our old Dodge and to the tank, I pulled it up 30 (feet) to the platform. Soon we had water piped into our house and it was modern.�

She continued, “... The boys (Bobby and George) roamed over the desert and I fretted because of rattlesnakes, scorpion and centipede.�

In 1930, Hale was the first to sign a Pima County petition to make the dirt path in front of his new house into a public highway. The new highway or road ran from present-day Irvington Road to just south of Hale’s property at Bantam Road.

The Pima County Board of Supervisors approved the new half-mile road, which was in between Park Avenue to the north and Camilla Avenue to the south, and designated it Road No. 240 or Hale Road.

Camilla Avenue, which was on the same alignment and named in 1928, ran between Bantam Road and Drexel Road.

During this period, when work was hard to find in town due to the Depression, Hale spent a few months in Ruby, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, working in the mines as a carpenter.

He also worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, building bridges in the Sabino Canyon area.

In 1939, Hale helped construct the church at what is now called Old ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Studios for the upcoming movie “ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€� starring William Holden and Jean Arthur.

In the early 1940s, with WWII waging, Bobby joined the U.S. Army Air Forces and George signed up for the U.S. Navy.

Fern remembered, “No one who has ever sent a son into war can know the agony of those days. ... never saw me cry but I shed enough tears to float a steamboat (a toy one at least). ... Well, I prayed without ceasing and God brought them safely through.�

In 1951 Millard and Fern Hale signed a Pima County petition for a public highway to make Hale Road — Irvington Road to Valencia Road — part of South Park Avenue so the name would align with the rest of the street name north of it. Hale Road disappeared into history.

In time Hale would retire from his carpentry job and live out his life along the street that used to be named in his honor. He died in 1963 and is buried at the South Lawn Memorial Cemetery just south of his former home.