Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I Heart original. Yeah, it's June nineteen
sixty nine. And the town, actually it's a borough of
(00:25):
Penn's Grove, New Jersey, is quiet. It's always quiet. Penns
Grove sits on the Delaware River, looking out across the
water to Wilmington. The sunsets are beautiful here, but it's
in contrast to the shoreline, which is covered in debris,
(00:48):
and to the businesses, many of which are boarded up.
Times are not prosperous. The local economy is in an
extended slump. The DuPont Chemical plant is one of the
few bright spots in a largely abandoned industrial town of
roughly six thousand people less than one square mile in size.
(01:12):
Only two things give Penn's Grove its identity. One, it's
Bruce Willis's hometown, though that won't really be notable for
another fifteen years or so. Today Bruce is just fourteen
and doing poorly in math class. The second notable thing
about Penn's Grove is that it's about to blow up.
(01:37):
A series of explosions rock the DuPont plant in nearby
Carneys Point. It's an explosives factory, and when catastrophe strikes.
It's seismic. Three storage areas filled with seventy five thousand
pounds of explosives are accidentally ignited, creating an inferno. Glass
(02:06):
shatters up to ten miles away. Kids at a nearby
school cower as windows are blown out of their classrooms.
The explosion ripples across the Delaware River, jolting people as
far as Wilmington's. A total of seven men died, with
(02:26):
many more injured. Investigators will be combing through the rubble
for days. Downtown PEngs Grove resembles a war zone. Debris everywhere,
doors ripped off their hinges. It was a scene reminiscent
of a disaster movie. It would probably be the climactic ending.
(02:50):
Actually it felt like armageddon. Despite the incident, DuPont remained
the biggest employer in town, one of the few job
opportunities in the area. In fact, even after the disaster,
Bruce Willis will graduate high school and work for DuPont,
(03:11):
just like his father had. That's just what you did
in Penn's Grove. Life didn't allow for a lot of dreaming.
Of course, Willis got out, made it big, you know
all that. But there will come in time when Willis
will be able to return to Penn's Grove, wealthy beyond
imagination and try to rescue it from oblivion. To sweep
(03:34):
up the glass and put the doors back on their hinges.
The adult Bruce Willis will breathe new life into his
hometown with plans that are as ambitious as anything he's
ever cooked up. Even though he's been busy doing just
that with his adopted hometown of Hailey, Idaho. Willis believes
(03:55):
there's room in his life for two Willisvilles, two towns
where his money and vision can create jobs and raise spirits.
After all, he did it with Haley, injecting a nightlife
and vibrancy to the sleepy and snowbound hamlet. Why couldn't
he do the same to his actual hometown, And why
(04:17):
couldn't those plans be much much bigger. Some thirty years
after Penn's Grove exploded, Bruce Willis came back, armed with
an audacious, fifty million dollar plan to take it from
the brink of insolvency, and for better and worse, another
(04:40):
shock wave was coming for I Heart Radio. This is
Haleywood and I Heart original podcast. I'm your host. Danish
(05:02):
sports and this is episode seven Homecoming. Penn's Grove did
have a heyday of sorts, and he used to be
capital Caviare of the world. That's Eric Myers, Penn's Grove
resident well um born and raised from Penn's Grove. I'm
(05:26):
the youngest of six six boys. Pen Grove was a
great place as I was a kid. You know, wasn't
a whole lot to do, but we made the best
of it. Eric wasn't around for the town's best days.
Those were during World War One when munitions became the
area's big industry, but he knows the story. The town's
(05:49):
population went from two thousand to six thousand in a blink.
Chemical plants like DuPont began to line the Delaware River.
It also brought a little bit of write Headenism, gambling, drinking.
Bordello's main Street in Penns Group at one time was
a happening the spot. You know, people come from all
(06:09):
over and you know, and that's what made the town
thrive at the time. Then progress hit and hit hard.
Someone went and built two bridges that allowed for easy
passage across the Delaware River. The Delaware Memorial Bridge was
(06:33):
finished in the nineteen fifties, so was interstate. But you know,
once the bridge was put in and no one came
through it no more, they bypassed it. And that's what
really made the town struggle, uh, financially, with stores and
stuff like that. Suddenly people could head to Wilmington's for
(06:54):
cheap goods in a state free of sales tax, Fewer
people had reason to pass through Penn's Grove. The chemical
plants began closing up, jobs were lost, Penn's Grove was
slowly being forgotten. I remember as a kid President Carter
came to Pen's Grove across from the library, and I
(07:15):
remember seeing him. He brought low income housing to the area,
and since then there was a lot of different stores
and stuff that none of them are there today. That's
the Penns Grove of Bruce Willis's childhood, a post boom
(07:36):
industrial town that had seen most of its industry leave.
Willis grew up in a house right next to his
grandfather's welding shop in Carney's Point, which isn't exactly the
same place, but close. Pen Grove is like one square
mile as about five thousand people. Corney's Point surrounds Penns
(08:00):
Grove and it's like a brother sister type community. Willis's
family were primarily blue collar workers. Willis's father, David, was
a mechanic and welder and worked at DuPont. Well, just
about everyone worked at DuPont. His father's relatives were also
(08:20):
mechanics and wilders. Willis worked in his grandfather's shop. After school,
he'd wander the halls of Penn's Grove, high humming on
his harmonica, being a class cut up, giving people the
idea he was destined for something. What well, who could
say but something? Willis knew it too. He'd tell teachers
(08:44):
who are upset over bad math tests that Penn's Grove
could never hold him. He had a freedom of spirit
that manifested in certain ways. He got busted for marijuana
back when that was scandalous, and he liked creaking, running
up and down Main Street wearing just sunglasses and sneakers.
(09:08):
As he grew he kept running. After working briefly at DuPont,
Willis left to attend Montclair State College, and you can
fill in the blanks. From there, he pursued acting, landed Moonlighting,
then die Hard, then superstardom. In one episode of Moonlighting,
David Addison finds himself in the slammer. His prison uniform
(09:32):
number was zero eight zero six nine, the zip code
of Penn's Grove. A little nod to his buddies back home,
but not the kind of thing that would change the
town's fortune. Hen's Grove was once recognized as the most
distressed town in New Jersey after new work. That's not
(09:55):
the kind of thing you put up at your visitor center.
Not that Pen's Grove had the visitor center in Penn's Grove.
It had been in the decline now for probably thirty
five years. And to see stores and businesses and the
community go downhill and have to get transitional aid from
(10:18):
the state and no jobs, and the people struggling, it
was it was deflating. It was depressing, and Willis knew it,
knew about its troubles. He had never lost his hometown connection.
His parents still lived there, and Willis would make return
trips back whenever his busy schedule allowed. He'd stop in
(10:40):
for a sub sandwich by locals, a few drinks, visit relatives,
cause a little bit of a stir, and then slip away.
Willis got a little closer for a longer period of
time he was shooting the science fiction movie Twelve Monkeys
in Philadelphia, just to shore ride from Penn's Grove. You know,
(11:02):
you would hear, you know, stories about, you know, this
guy from Penn's Grove who's trying to make it big
in Hollywood. And I knew one of his good friends,
Mark Murphy, that I had worked for doing carpentry, roofing
and stuff like that, and he was always, you know,
proud of Bruce's accomplishments and would talk about him, being like, hey,
(11:25):
he's my good buddy. Pretty soon Eric and Bruce crossed paths.
So I started a small landscaping company, me and my
best friend Billy Vanam and clean it up yards and
leave removal, gutter cleaning. And my buddy Mark Murphy said, hey,
I want you to stop by up to the waterfront.
Want to introduce you to someone and see if you
(11:47):
want to clean up the property. Willis bought his father
the nicest house on Main Street and it was going
to need some care, and so Mark introduced me and
it really didn't register it for and then Mark was like, yeah,
this is Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, the TV series, And
I was like, oh, Eric, helped out around the property,
(12:09):
getting to know the Willis family and becoming friendly with
Bruce's father, David. I became really close to David. He
was just, you know, a great guy to talk to, Uh,
like a mentor. That the house looked beautiful. I mean,
people rode by it all the time, and the area
was just coming alive. Around the same time he was
(12:33):
shooting twelve monkeys, Willis started telling a real estate agent,
a friend of his named Maggie Dietrich, about what he
was doing at thousands of miles away in Hayley, Idaho,
how he had bought the mint and a movie theater
and more. He'd given this tiny town a jolt of excitement.
Maybe he said there were opportunities in Penn's Grove to
(12:56):
do the same. But before he explained himself, he did
what Bruce Willis was in the habit of doing. He
swore Maggie Dietrich to secrecy. He told Dietrich that if
she breathed a word of this to anyone, he'd disappear.
Maggie agreed, and so Bruce Willis told her he was
(13:17):
very interested in some other property in Penns Grove, property
like the Penn's Grove National Bank and Trust Building, which
was notable for allegedly having once been robbed by gangster
pretty boy Floyd, though that might be more urban legend
than fact. It was also where Willis's mother used to
(13:38):
work and where he had opened his first ever savings account.
He also wanted to buy another building, this one a
former library, and another building a one time Masonic lodge,
and he had ideas to bring like a like a restaurant,
like a steakhouse where the bank would be. I guess
(13:58):
it was something similar like he did out Hailey, Idaho,
and I thought his ideas were brilliant and would would
make a big impact in the town. After Maggie took
her vow of silence, Willis disclosed something else. He was
(14:19):
looking at twelve acres of riverfront property sitting along the
Delaware River. It was all unoccupied. A crumbling pier stretched
out into the oil slicked water and reached clear into
Wilmington's On the surface, it looked well unspectacular, but Penn's
(14:40):
Grove is centrally located. There are roughly four million people
who are less than thirty miles away. Even though Penn's
Grove only had six thousand people. It had an amazing
view of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. When you stood near
the river as the sunset overlooking Wilmington's you could feel
the possibilities, untapped potential, and the land was reasonable for
(15:06):
less than a million dollars. Willis bought the twelve acres,
and just like he had in Haley, he did it
under a company name. In Haley it was x NAY.
In Penn's Grove it was Screwball Incorporated. Slowly the town
began to understand what Willis and Screwball inc. Were planning.
(15:27):
It was about much more than a few buildings. Willis
didn't want to merely revitalize Penn's Grove with a facelift.
He wanted to draw in all the people who had
deserted it when the bridge and highway opened. He was
going to put Penn's Grove back on everyone's map by
(15:49):
opening a massive entertainment complex and marina. And soon the
town that had been mostly forgotten suddenly noticed something unusual.
Won't Tourists began pulling up to the barren waterfront, getting
out of their cars and taking pictures of an empty
plot of land strewn with trash, maybe it was just
(16:13):
so someday they could tell people this is what it
looked like before Bruce Willis came and saved the day.
I kinda was excited. I was like, you know, blessed
Bruce might come back to town and do something. And
when I heard and saw what was going on, yeah
it was. It was a good feeling, not just for me,
(16:34):
but for the entire community. Sometimes people would stop by
a place called Willis Hardware, thinking there had to be
some kind of a connection. Maybe it was the first
Bruce Willis storefront. Maybe Bruce Willis would sell you a hammer.
It wasn't, but people took pictures of it anyway. Amidst
(16:54):
all this excitement, words spread that Bruce Willis had even
grander ambitions than water front development. There was news reporters
and just seeing it building, everything getting cleaned up, and
the momentum, and now people from all over wanted to
know what was going on. The marina and entertainment complex
(17:15):
were one thing, A big thing, sure, but just one thing.
If everything went well, Penn's Grove wouldn't just be resurrected.
It might become another Atlantic city. The town's leaders began
(17:41):
buzzing Willis was back. A town councilman named Rick Cowles
started a website named Bruno Watch. It was a kind
of parody of a tabloid, with rumors and innuendo about
Willis mixed with actual fact. Not too many people in
Penn's Grove read brew No Watch, though, to be fair,
(18:02):
most of them didn't have Internet access, but Cowles persisted.
He lived on Main Street and watched as cars with
strange license plates drove by, hoping to catch a glimpse
of something. He reported on the fact that Willis's representatives
had appeared at a city council meeting to unveil his
master plan, a massive fifty million dollar riverfront entertainment complex
(18:27):
that would host a ninety room hotel, restaurants, movie theaters, shops,
fresh fish obviously, maybe a return of Caviare and Marina,
big enough for a hundred boats. Already, local real estate
prices were rising ten to fifteen percent. The plan would
create hundreds and hundreds of jobs for an area that
(18:51):
was suffering from a fifteen percent unemployment rate, three times
that of the national average at the time. This was
a big deal, and fifty million, well, that wasn't a
number Penn's Grove, ever, expected to see. The town's annual
budget was just a tenth of that. One of the
anchors of the riverfront complex was thought to be something
(19:13):
that harkened back to the earliest days of Penn's Grove.
From all appearances, it seemed like Willis wanted to get
into the business of riverboat gambling. Like Bruce we you know,
I knew the idea was to try to bring riverboat gambling.
It was like a fifty million dollar project to bring
(19:34):
riverboat gambling to the Penn's Grove waterfront. Riverboat casinos were
and are a kind of legal sleight of hand dot
do on water. They can circumvent certain laws related to
gambling on land. At the time, Delaware, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania we're all considering legalizing riverboat gambling. The property Willis
(19:58):
was eying already contained appear. There were ideas for a
ferry across the Delaware River and back, making it easy
for pleasure seekers to make their way into Penn's Grove
from towns like Newcastle, Delaware City, or Pennsville. While on
the water, people could try their hand at games of
skill and chance. This was vegas by way of Willis
(20:21):
Bruno backerat maybe Bruno Slot Machines. It would all take time,
but the people of Penn's Grove weren't just sitting idly by.
Not long after Willis made his plans public, sixteen small
businesses materialized in Penn's Grove, all of them hoping to
(20:43):
capitalize on the people Willis's plans would be attracting. There
was Marshall's Clothing, a trendy apparel shop. There was Bobby's Place,
a small supermarket just across the way, where a shopkeeper
and her son swept the floors and patiently waited for
can instruction workers to start dropping by. A pizza place
(21:03):
called Italian Kitchen, where Willis sometimes phone for pizza, opened
its first ever dining room area to host the expected
overflow of customers. Penn's Grove was suddenly home to a
lot of entrepreneurs. Eric Myers was one of them. A
couple of times I had to go to the airport
to pick up some of Bruce's people. I would go
(21:27):
in my pickup truck or you know, whatever I could get,
and that gave me the idea, like, you know, how
can you get like a car service or limo, and
there was nothing in the area. This was long before Uber.
With the influx of tourists, gamblers and v I p
s they'd need wheels. I put a business plan together
(21:48):
and and I'd saved some money, and so I saw
these limos for sale, and a gold stretch Limo which
was a six passenger and a white one, and I
ended up started Riverfront Limousine Service with the Golden Touch,
and I started with them two vehicles, And that's how
it started out. As he might expect, one of Eric's
(22:12):
customers was Bruce Willis, who was dropping in and out
of town regularly. I did pick up Bruce from the
Newcastle County Airport and brought him over to the house.
I would pick up some of his people, take him
to local meetings over the d R B A and
the Della Memorial Bridge and different stuff like that. Eric
(22:35):
knew it would be poor form to pepper Bruce Willis
with questions about the development from the driver's seat. Instead,
bits and pieces of information would come from Bruce's father, David.
David was just as excited as anyone to see development
come to penns Grove. His father would just tell me
a Bruce really busy, He's doing this, doing that, And
(22:57):
I'd ask a few questions and he would only tell
me what needed to know. I really went pry into
is he going to do this? Is he going to
do that? Because I just figured I I would see
it happen at some point, you know or not. But
Penn's Grove didn't dwell on the or not part. The
(23:19):
penns Grove National Bank and Trust Company building was being gutted.
Willis had all but locked up most of the desirable
riverfront property. Small businesses were popping up. Against all odds.
The town was coming back to life. Willis had even
taken political steps to realize his ambitions. In Willis drove
(23:42):
to the governor's residence of Christine Todd Whitman. Their women
committed to offering whatever state resources she could to make
sure Willis's plans move forward. Now the state of New
Jersey was backing Willis's efforts. Penn's Grove also agreed to
help screwball and get some grant money for the development.
(24:02):
The only thing the borough balked at was a Willis
plan for housing. He wanted to put up fifty homes
in the area right on the waterfront, a kind of
Lovett Town or Willis Town. But Penn's Grove didn't need housing.
They had a glood of that. Their sewers were at capacity.
They wanted people, people to spend their money by day
(24:25):
and go back home at the end of the night.
They wanted activity, action. They wanted Bruce Willis to build
his vast riverboat gambling empire like yesterday. But just as
in Haley, Willis wasn't a full time developer. He was
a movie star, and the movie star was needed on set.
(24:46):
In early Willis chose a film project that made the
people in his hometown even more enthusiastic. He started shooting
a movie titled Broadway Brawler, about a broken down hockey
layer who gets romantically involved with a single mom played
by more Tyranny. It was said to be a sports
(25:10):
comedy in the vein of Jerry McGuire, which had come
out the previous year. The plot isn't what got penns
Grove excited, though. What got penns Grove excited was that
Willis was shooting Broadway Brawler in Wilmington, Delaware, right across
the river. It was another move that would aid in
about the local economy, bringing jobs and money thanks to
(25:32):
the cast and crew. Willis even took what was for
him a pay cut. He made only seven point five
million dollars, rather than the twenty million A Starring World
typically brought him. He reportedly liked the script the story
enough to make some concessions, and shooting in Wilmington's kept
(25:53):
him close to Penn's Grove, close enough to keep tabs
on its evolution. The Bruno Watch website kept a close
eye on things. Progress was slow but steady. The town
was in a state of anticipation, waiting for Bruce Willis
to unveil one of those tiny tabletop models of the
Marina project, waiting for ground to be broken and for
(26:16):
cars to start crossing the bridge back to Penn's Grove,
waiting for Bruce Willis to save the day, just like
in the movies. Eric Myers opened up a newspaper one
day in and flinched a little bit. It was about
(26:41):
Bruce Willis and his plans for Penn's Grove. There is
a an article that was written and my name was
in it, and it was kind of crappy, said, you know,
as I ride down main street of Pen's Grove, and
I see the pigeons and the seagulls crapping on the buildings,
(27:02):
and the beer cans and diapers flowing down the gutters.
One young man by the name of Eric Myers started
a limousine business, the idea of transforming the town. It
was met with a kind of hostility. Penn's Grove had
spent too long in dire straits, and even optimists had issues.
(27:23):
Criticism was starting to bubble up that things weren't happening
fast enough, that Penn's Grove might be too small for
a movie stars big ambitions. It was everything Bruce Willis
didn't want. What he had warned real estate agent Maggie
Dietrich about every detail put under a microscope. And then
I realized that, you know, all this negative publicity, why
(27:47):
would Bruce continue giving him trouble trying to do the
riverboat gambling? Just all there was many things that I
could tell that he was getting frustrated, And Willis was frustrated,
not just about Penn's Grove. In February, after twenty days
of shooting and seventeen million dollars spent on Broadway Brawler,
(28:11):
the Bruce Willis Hockey romance movie. Willis decided he wasn't
happy with the way things were going, and he was
Bruce Willis, so he made his feelings known. He clashed
with the female director, Lee Grant, and did something he
could do as a producer on the film. He fired her.
(28:32):
He also fired her husband, Joe Fury, who was also producing,
And he fired the cinematographer, William Franker, and he fired
the wardrobe designer, Carol Oditz. Bruce Willis was on a
firing spree. Then he brought on a man named Dennis Dugan,
who had directed Willis during his moonlighting days. Dennis Dugan
(28:55):
lasted one day before he was told to go home.
This Poe Willis and a tight spot. He had, after all,
agreed to star in Broadway Brawler, and now he seemed
to be opposed to showing up unless the movie could
be made exactly the way you wanted it to be made.
Bruce Willis was having a movie star sized tantrum. Synergy,
(29:18):
the studio behind the movie, had no idea what to do.
No one was sure what to do next. It just
so happened that Disney was in the process of buying
out Synergy, and they saw the spat between Willis and
the studio as an opportunity, Yeah, Disney told Willis they'd
(29:41):
reimburse Synergy for the seventeen million dollars they had lost
on the unfinished movie if Willis agreed to star in
two or three movies for Disney at a cut rate.
For Willis, that meant a cool fourteen million dollars instead
of his usual twenty million quote Hollywood's version of a discount.
(30:03):
One of those movies ended up being The Sixth Cents,
far and away the biggest hit of Willis's career. So
Bruce Willis managed to extricate himself with a kind of
golden parachute, one with a big mouse shaped logo. Only
if anyone in Penn's Grove read about Broadway Brawler, it
(30:23):
might have been caused for a little concern. If he
could walk away from a movie, what else could he
walk away from? You know, after the fact, you know,
it was I think announced in the papers and Council
that Bruce and screwballing was, you know, pulling out the
project by the spring of roughly two years after Willis
(30:49):
first purchased the riverfront property and with no real construction,
having commenced a J. Crishenz the Burrows a list of
Penn's Grove got a call from Joe McAllister, Willis's head
hauncho at Screwball, Inc. McAllister told him, in as few
words as possible, that Bruce Willis had lost interest in
Penn's Grove. There would be no marina, no hotel, no restaurant,
(31:15):
and no riverboat gambling. Christen Zi tried to get some
kind of explanation. Didn't Willis realize the town had put
their hopes in him, That over a dozen small businesses
had opened in anticipation of the complex, with some taking
out twenty five thousand dollar loans to get started. Didn't
Bruce Willis remember the blown out windows of his youth,
(31:37):
the cratered areas left behind by du Pont. Christen Z
couldn't ask any of these questions. Joe McAllister had disconnected
his phone number. Penn's Grove went into a tailspin. Some
believed Willis was just bluffing, trying to get real estate
prices down, and I just maybe it was, you know,
(32:01):
a strategy to give some time to uh, you know,
shut things down for a little bit, and too they
could you know, get other people involved. And at least
I was hoping anyhow, but it was no bluff. Many
of the businesses absent to the expected tourist dollars didn't survive,
(32:21):
and it felt personal. It wasn't that some developer had
changed their mind. Those were a dime a dozen. Bruce Willis,
the hometown hero, had changed his mind. Shortly after I
started my business, Bruce decided to shut things down. So
I was working for Clementi's construction company doing curbing, getting
(32:42):
up early and pouring concrete and curbs and sidewalks and
then go home and take phone calls and wash cars.
And I was overwhelmed. And I'll never forget it that
I was down to my like three pennies literally, and
I had moved home home, back to my parents with
(33:02):
the limos everything, and I wasn't sure if I was
going to make it. Frustrated, Eric gave an interview to
a reporter from a local newspaper. This guy convinced me that, look,
we're here to help. Just say a few words on
how that impacted you. And after the story was published,
well you might see where this is going. Bruce got
(33:23):
upset with me, and I was kind of shocked to
get a phone call from them saying, hey, don't use
my name, you know, try to avoid that stuff. And
I was. I was blown away that. Look, I'm here,
living here, trying to make the best out of it,
and I'm not upset with you that it pulled out.
But it's bigger than that. What I said was nothing
(33:45):
negative towards him. It was just that with or without
Bruce Willis, I think this community can move forward and
grow and and develop. What frustrated Pen's Grove the most
was that Bruce will Us never explained why, never offered
a reason as to why he announced big, ambitious plans
(34:06):
and then backed away from them. The town was left
to wonder if they had done something wrong, had someone
said the wrong thing, had they not paved a road
he wanted to travel down. Was it all the red
tape surrounding the gambling, Or was a town less than
one square mile simply too small for his big ideas.
(34:27):
Or maybe it was just that if you build a
massive complex, what do you do with the rest of
Penn's Grove boarded up and blaighted. Maybe Bruce Willis realized
being the savior of Penn's Grove, New Jersey was just
too much. You know, when Bruce come in, people were
really you know, I'll be like, Bruce, are you're really
(34:49):
going to do this or you really? You know, like wow,
you know, I don't know if that's the right approach.
You know, They're word about so many things in town
where I was like, why don't we give it a chance?
It it just seemed like it needed to be done
so bad, the community needed so much that the pressure
was overwhelming. Two years later, Willis sold the twelve acres
(35:13):
to a developer who managed to put a riverwalk in place,
but couldn't get much further than that. Today, Penn's Grove
is still known primarily for being the town where Bruce
Willis was raised, where he patrolled the halls of his
high school and announced he was destined for something bigger,
and for telling a town that it was destined for
(35:35):
something bigger. It came true for Willis, it didn't come
true for Penn's Grove, But twenty six years later, Eric
Is still in business. I worked long hours, and you know,
and UH started it from the ground up, and I
(35:55):
was proud of that, and I'm proud still today. Even
the challenges through over the years for Eric. Bruce Willis
isn't the bad guy in this story. He was a
guy who saw his hometown in trouble and tried to help.
Bruce is a businessman and movie star maker, and but
he made a decision. And you know, I'm I'm not
(36:17):
at all upset. I haven't transported Bruce in a while. Um.
I was blessed to do his father tuneral, who I
missed a lot. And I might have picked up Bruce
once or twice to bring him into town after that.
So it's been a while. And uh, but have you
(36:38):
ever calls me? I'm right there for him. And I
think he knows that Eric himself has taken a page
from the Willis playbook. He's been buying bladed properties and
rehabilitating them. His limo business has a ten thousand square
foot building nearby. More than one hometown boy made good.
I still and you know a lot of people then
(36:59):
say Eric, wasting your time. But I still think the
Pensburg Waterfront is one of the last properties on the
Delaware River that is left to be developed. It has
a beautiful view of the Della Memorial Bridge to Twin
Span bridges coming across and going, you know, and the
Wilmington's skyline, and it's got the best sunsets, and you know,
(37:22):
stories and people that's come from there. I still think
one day something amazing is going to happen, and I
just hope I'm alive to sit two thousand miles away.
(37:44):
The people of Haley heard bits and pieces of the
penns Grove saga that Willis had found a kind of
Doppelganger town to nourish before leaving it in the lurch,
But there were important differences Willis's plans. Prepend Grove had
never made it past the drawing board. Haley, he had
(38:04):
already transformed it, had already made it his home, had
already lit up the mint with his band and put
his name on the marquis at the Liberty. Haley had
been his home for over a decade. By this point,
nothing about Haley was hypothetical. It was all as real
as the ground it was built on. But if you looked,
(38:25):
really looked, you could see something in Bruce Willis that
could be considered a pattern. When he didn't like what
was happening with Broadway Brawler, he walked away. When he
couldn't make Penn's Grove work, he walked away. Willis had
a tendency to disappear if things weren't exactly how he
wanted them to be. So what exactly would happen to
(38:48):
Haley if Bruce Willis didn't think things were going his way?
I was the one year in my position that had
to drop the bomb on it twenty dollars of more
some months to cover the bills Hailey was about to
find out. Haleywood is hosted by Danis Schwartz. This show
(39:16):
is written by Jake Rawson, editing by Derrick Clements, Mary
do and me Josh Fisher. Sound design and mixing by
Jeremy Thal, Derrek Clemens, and me Josh Fisher. Original music
by Natasha Jacobs. Research and fact checking by Jake Rawson,
Austin Thompson and Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quentinia.
(39:39):
Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch and our executive producer
is Jason English. Special thanks to the people of Hailey,
Idaho and all those who've shared their stories. Haileywood is
a production of I Heart Radio. Until Next Time