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.