Halie of the Alley. The alley was my first backyard. The flowers were remnants of old cobblestone, the shrubs were trash cans, and the trees were our neighbors’ back porches, all mostly identical, gray or aging brown, almost all topping at three stories. And oh, what stories. 

The alleys changed over the years. They became streets, schools, jobs, even a rodeo corral, an iconic highway, and, eventually, a corporate office. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, however, the alley was a favorite playground for the neighborhood kids. We had nicknames back then, many given by our own mothers when they called us in for supper. Mine was “Halie, Halie, King of the Alley.” For the most part, our parents thought it was safe for us to play in the alley if it was still light out. It was close to home, it was generally in the company of other kids, and almost always within sight of or hearing of at least one of our parents. The caveats were “…if it was still light, …generally, and …almost always.” The alley did have a darker side. Fortunately, very few of us saw it. Unfortunately, I was one of the few. You can read more on that when I post it to my blog, Halie of the Alley.

I’m Hal T. Horowitz and welcome to my site. If you’re wondering about the T, I’ve always liked to tell people that Trouble is my middle name. I’ve been making up stories since childhood, leading teachers I didn’t even know to occasionally “borrow” me for a few minutes to amuse their students while they took a break. That I missed parts of my own class could not have brought my grades much lower. My own teachers frequently complained to my parents that I spent more time staring out the window than I did at the blackboard.

I was born in Chicago in 1943. My family moved to Los Angeles when I was 10 and due to a series of subsequent, almost annual moves up and toward “a better life,” I attended few schools for more than a year or two, so I learned to make friends quickly. I began putting pen to paper at 14 after acing a creative writing assignment in the 9th grade and I pursued my newfound writing interests as a journalism student throughout high school.

At 17, in lieu of starting college in the fall as planned, I was ready to pack up and go on the road with a traveling rodeo. There’s a longer story there that you’ll also find in Halie of the Alley. The spoiler is that I did start college, but I dropped out to join the Air Force where I found I was able to satisfy my desire to make up stories by ghostwriting letters for my less articulate buddies to their mothers, wives and girlfriends. In 1962 I spent the first half of a two-week leave hitchhiking the entirety of the old Route 66 and recording the best of the adventure. More on that in Halie of the Alley, too.

After finally achieving the appearance of maturity, I emerged as a professional in the finance industry during which career I wrote and ghostwrote several articles for a variety of trade mags and house organs. About 30 years later I reinvented myself and became an executive recruiter for the finance and banking industries where I often assisted candidates with constructing their résumés and composing cover letters. Somehow, that, too, fomented my skills in fiction.

Photo by Broom. At 80, with the full support of Barb, my late wife of 46 years, and my three kids and four grandchildren, I completed and published my debut novel, an epic tale of five generations of a Scots Irish family’s journey from the Old World to the New and, in the personage of Tam Wade Broom, the fifth of the generations and a world-class photojournalist, back to the Old. I hope you will read it. I am confident you’ll enjoy it.

Watch for other novels to follow. For other of my work, please visit my pages, The Short Story Store, and My Poems and Ballads.