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Teddy Hale (né Theodore Homer Haley; 1924–1959) was an influential American virtuoso tap dancer from New York City.

Career

Hale lived in New York City since 1930. But the last six months of his life, he lived in a boarding house in Washington, D.C., were he had been appearing in clubs.

Hale appeared at the 1939 New York World's Fair and once was cited by President Eisenhower after dancing at a dinner for the President. He appeared many years with Ted Lewis and for a short while was Lewis' "shadow" in his dance routines.

The song "Shoe Shine Boy" – Sammy Cahn (words); Saul Chaplin (music); "From Connie's Hot Chocolates" – was written in 1936 for Hale and Louis Armstrong when they appeared together at Connie's Inn.

A 1937 article in the New York Age mentions Teddy Hale as a protege of Ted Lewis, which, possibly, why he was known as Ted Lewis, Jr., as a young man.

Legal matters, civil and criminal

• 1944: Hale was arrested for alleged draft dodging, though he contended, in the press, that he failed to show-up for a required spinal test because he feared the risk of debilitating injury.

• 1950s: By the mid-1950s, there had been reports suggesting that Hale used heroin.

• May 1955: In Las Vegas, Hale was held by police on suspicion of manslaughter when saxophonist Wardell Gray died from injuries during a heroin party in Hale's room. Hale and Gray, a member of Benny Carter's band, were both scheduled to appear in the inaugural show of the newly opened Moulin Rouge Hotel, Las Vegas' first interracial hotel.

• November 2, 1957: In Harlem on the corner of 126th Street and Eighth Avenue (Frederick Douglass Boulevard), bystanders Hale and Fred Moore (born around 1924), were both wounded by "ricocheting" .38 caliber bullets fired by two New York Police officers, while apprehending a man, suspected of carrying a concealed weapon. The officers fired five shots, four by Officer Roger Cortes, and one by Officer George Olsen. Hale was wounded in the left leg and Moore in the right leg. The suspect, Curtis Springer (1921–1957), was shot in the groin.

Springer, a known drug pusher with a criminal record, was, at the time, an upholstery shop clerk. He was subsequently charged for gun possession under the Sullivan Act and held in Sydenham Hospital under guard of NYPD officer Ronald Beck. While in the hospital, Springer leaped four floors to his death from his hospital window in an apparent escape attempt.

Springer, in 1940, is listed in the U.S. Census as an inmate at the Hart Island Prison Reformatory.

One of Springer's brothers, Wentworth Springer (1919–1983), had been, in 1935, convicted of murder and sentenced to death for being one of three who killed a store clerk, Morris Emert (1889–1935), who had laughed at them as they attempted a holdup. New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman communicated Wentworth's sentence. The other two convicted killers were Lawrence P. Jackson (1918–1994) and Robert Thomas Taliaferro (1917–1997).

In 1957, Hale filed suit against the City of New York asking for $2.5 million in damages, alleging, among other things, that the officers had been negligent and that the resulting injury was a permanent career-ender.

Death

Hale died May 7, 1959, 16 days before his 37rd birthday, in a rooming house in Washington, D.C., in the 1400 block of U Street, where he had been living for 6 months. A few months before he died, he told Pittsburgh Courier columnist George E. Pitts that, since filing suit against New York City, the "cops" hassled him so much that he decided to move to Washington while awaiting trial. He also told told Pitts that he regrettably had made and ran through a fortune.

Videography

• "Teddy Hale" on YouTube, Texaco Star Theatre, Milton Berle, host, NBC Television, March 22, 1949

Dance contemporaries

Hale was well connected with Gregory Hines, Charles "Honi" Coles, and Howard "Sandman" Sims at the Apollo Theater.

Family

Marriages

Cassandra Hale, also a dancer, and Teddy were married in 1947. (separated before 1952) She filed for divorce in New York in 1952, claiming that Rose Hardaway was "the other woman."

That album – It’s Time for Rose Hardaway – was a solid pop vocal effort. It would also be her last recording. There’s little, almost drastically so, about Hardaway’s subsequent whereabouts. She seems to have been beset by various travails at points in her life, however. In 1952, she was picked up for drugs (along with pianist Erroll Garner) as well as cited independently as the “other woman” in the divorce proceeding between dancer Teddy Hale and his wife. And in 1959, she was jailed for some combination of larceny and forgery, though in the short run this seems to have been inconsequential to her recording career.