From Navy Pilot to Parish Priest: 

Brad Hall’s Magnificent JOURNEY HOME

He sounds like two people when you read his resume. He was a twenty-year Naval officer who loved to fly. He talked of long night flights over the North Sea tracking Russian submarines.... dangerous, scary stuff. He thrived on it and he was good, and his superiors knew it. They sent him to postgraduate school in Monterey, California, and then to England.

On his return to the States, he went to Norfolk, Virginia, still flying, and then he was sent back to California where he was on the staff at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. In 1970, he was assigned to the Naval Rework Facility in Coronado. The Navy was moving him up. In 1974, Carol, daughter Susan and he moved to Washington, D.C. He’d been assigned to the Pentagon. He was on track; it appeared, to work his way up to Admiral.

But after seven years of searching, questioning, counseling…Brad Hall knew that it was time to make a change in his life, and in his family’s. In 1977, twenty years after receiving his wings in one of the proudest moments of his life, he resigned his commission in the United States Navy.

He’d worked with NASA through the years in the selection of space shuttle astronauts. On the day he signed his release papers from the Navy, NASA officials were at his door. “Do we have a job for you!” they said. But he declined, and later told Carol that he had just turned down the “last temptation.” It wasn’t the road he needed to be on, he said. That road, he was now convinced, was the road that would lead him into the priesthood. The Halls packed up their belongings, got in their VW, and headed to seminary in California.

“Brad always believed you have to have a vision to carry you forward,” Carol said. “He was truly a builder. He always wanted to be growing, personally and in everything he did.”

Brad and his twin brother Bob were born in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1934. Younger brother Ray came along several years later. “Brad always loved athletics: tennis, swimming, cycling, rowing, jogging,” Carol noted. “All of his life he loved opera, traveling, thinking, doing. And he loved birding. When we were first married, we used to go birding every Saturday. He was very good at it. He could see a bird fly and tell what it was by its flight pattern. He and his twin brother were Boy Scouts and they loved the out-of-doors.

“He was always very active. He woke up sparkling. He could do more in a day than any person I’ve ever seen. He could always accomplish so much and enjoy doing it. He went to parochial school until he was sixteen. He was going to the Episcopal Church when I met him in college.

“Brad always loved to read, study, go to school,” Carol said. “If he was working in the day, he’d take classes at night! He held a number of degrees: a bachelor’s degree in math from the University of North Carolina, and advanced degrees from the Naval Postgraduate School, The Cranfield Institute of Technology in England and The Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

Brad’s resume clearly reflects the depth and development of his interests and intellect:

“Brad was a true student,” said Carol. “And where he is now,” she added, “I figure he must be in the biggest library they have, doing his researching and writing.”

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