Kenneth Locke Hale

Everyone’s life has a pivotal moment, a moment when, had things gone otherwise, we would be someone other than the person we turned out to be. In the case of Ken Hale that moment may have been in the life, or rather the death, of his grandfather. A Dartmouth alumnus, class of 1903, and, at the time of his death, chairman of the Illinois Bell telephone system, Floyd Orlin Hale suffered a fatal stroke while attending a Dartmouth-Yale football game. The inheritance occasioned by that untimely death enabled Ken’s father to do something he had always wanted to do—exchange commercial banking in Chicago for ranching in Arizona. Ken Hale was six years old when Robert Locke Hale and his wife, Mary Adelaide, moved from Chicago to a ranch in Canelo, Arizona.

The transition from the leafy confines of an upscale neighborhood in Chicago to the crackled brown and clear-washed blue expanses of Arizona would have been traumatic for many. For Ken it was like introducing a fish to water. Anyone who ever visited Ken in his office would not have failed to notice the framed photograph of a rodeo cowboy caught in midair as he dove from horse to lassoed heifer. That picture, freezing in time as it did another ‘mad pursuit’, was to Ken what Ode on a Grecian Urn was to John Keats. It was a frozen moment in a time and place he never left behind, despite his incredible journey into the heady world of theoretical linguistics.

As a child, Ken spent his time trapping, shooting, and riding. He even planned to be a gunsmith. I once asked him if his father was good at ranching. He said his father was good at whatever he turned his hand to. That must have been where Ken got it from. Had he become a gunsmith instead of a linguist, his guns would have ended up behind glass in the Smithsonian Museum.

Ken went to the University of Arizona in 1952 and majored in anthropology, the closest program to native languages of the Southwest he could find. Even so, he divided his undergraduate days between weekend ‘jackpot’ rodeos, studying anthropology, and working on whatever native American languages came within earshot.

In 1955, his senior year at the University of Arizona, he won the bull riding event at the University’s rodeo. From that day on, except for rare occasions that required a dress suit or a tuxedo, he never took off the belt buckle his winning ride earned him. That same year he also entered the bull riding event in the Tucson rodeo. His ride was immortalized on film in the movie Arena. There was a story in the Tucson paper the day after the rodeo. Under a headline that read: clown saves waddy from charging bull, the text began: ‘Kenneth Hall narrowly escaped serious injury . . . ’. The photograph caught Ken on his back kicking the bull in the face. That was the first Ken’s father heard about it. He admonished Ken for his foolishness in entering the rodeo. Then he commiserated with him about the misspelling of his name, ‘They either call us Hall, or Hull, or Hole’.

After he graduated from the University of Arizona, he entered graduate study in linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. His 1958 MA thesis, ‘Class II prefixes in Navajo’, and his 1959 PhD dissertation, ‘A Papago grammar’, both written under the guidance of his advisor, Carl Voegelin, drew heavily on linguistic knowledge he had acquired as a teenager.

At the age of fourteen, he enrolled at the Verde Valley School in Sedona, Arizona. There he roomed with a Hopi boy and learned Hopi, and then with a Jemez boy and learned Jemez. Since neither language was written at the time, Ken developed his own system for each. His Spanish teacher wanted him to concentrate only on Spanish and then French; Ken said she never understood that he learned faster by working on several languages at once. He resented the time he had to spend on academic subjects other than languages. After two years, he managed to talk his parents into allowing him...