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The Coachman's Son. Leonard Hall was born and bred on the North Shore of Nassau County, Long Island, a baronial strip of land that was sacred to Republicans. ("In the Hoover campaign," Hall recalls, "the finance people set quotas for the 48 states and Nassau County.") But the Halls were no landed GOPatricians; Father Franklyn Hall was the coachman at Theodore Roosevelt's Oyster Bay estate, Sagamore Hill. Leonard, the youngest of eight Hall children, was born on Oct. 2, 1900. When Len was an infant, his father's employer was elected Vice President of the U.S., and a month after the election Teddy Roosevelt noted the new baby's arrival in a letter to his old friend and Spanish-American War commander (the Rough Riders), General Leonard Wood.
"You may be amused to know that my coachman, Franklin [sic] Hall, who has a large family of small children (including a small boy named after me), has recently been presented with another small boy, and my little girl Ethel, who acted as its godmother, selected Leonard Wood for its name. This was done purely on her own account and I never knew of it until a few days ago. Tell Mrs. Wood."
Before Len Hall was a year old, President McKinley was assassinated, and President Theodore Roosevelt brought his coachman to Washington to be chief messenger at the White House. Franklyn Hall kept his job until his death in 1915, but left his family behind in the roomy house he had built in Oyster Bay, returning home for vacations and occasional holidays. From childhood Len was immersed in politics, and Teddy Roosevelt became and remained his political ideal.
The Hall children had a robust country upbringing. In the winters there was coasting on the slope of the big hill where their house stood, and skating on the pond at the bottom. On summer days the family often picnicked on the beach, where father Hall had built a brick oven for feasts of winkles and horseshoe crabs. There were few luxuries, and the Hall boys chored around the neighborhood for spending money, but it was a happy, close-knit life. His mother taught Len how to handle a gun (he is still a skilled trap-shooter), and tutored him in his studies so expertly that he skipped to the third grade a month after he entered school.
In 1916, the year after his father died, Len went to Washington, drawn there by Franklyn Hall's vivid stories of life in the capital. The lanky boy's life was far from vivid. He got a $50-a-month job with the Potomac Electric Power Co., thus managed to support himself while attending night classes at the Georgetown University Law School. It was not easy. Hall often wore old clothes ("I invented the idea of wearing pants and coat that didn't match"), worked out a complicated route to school so he would not have to spend more than a nickel streetcar fare. After three years, at 19, Hall got his law degree.