From The Writer’s Almanac
It’s the birthday of the singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen, born in Freehold, New Jersey (1949). He was a working class kid. His father took odd jobs. His mother worked as a secretary. Bruce didn’t do well in school. He didn’t seem to have much ambition. Then he saw Elvis on TV, and he scraped together $18 to buy a secondhand guitar. Music was his way of being noticed by people. By the time he was 14, he was playing in local bands on the bar circuit, bands with names like the Rogues, the Castiles, the Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom.
He played at prisons and mental hospitals, a rollerdrome, shopping center parking lot, and he played at firemen’s balls. His first album was Greetings from Asbury Park (1973). In just a few years, he’d been on the cover of Time magazine. He was a best-selling artist.
Monmouth County, where Bruce Springsteen grew up, lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other county in New Jersey. He read the New York Times obituaries, and he saw how many times one of his songs was played at a memorial service and how many of the articles mentioned that the deceased had loved Springsteen’s music. There was a headline for one man, Jim Berger, that read: “Fan of the Boss,” so Springsteen called up his widow, Suzanne. Another fan was a firefighter named Joe Farrelly, and Springsteen called his wife as well. She later said, “I got through Joe’s memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call.”