The trucks rumbled up Throckmorton Street all month long, flatbeds stacked high with sacks of potatoes just dug from the fields that surrounded Freehold in every direction. The warehouses along the railroad siding there were filling with the signature local crop, bound for New York and Philadelphia and cities beyond. The harvest had come, and with it the season when the town and the farms around it were intertwined more tightly than in any other.

The town of Bruce’s youth was, like his Italian mother and his Irish father, a mixed marriage. A few blocks from that stream of inbound trucks carrying potatoes was a stream of outbound trucks carrying rolls of carpet woven at the rug mill, and a few blocks beyond that was another stream of outbound trucks carrying jars of instant coffee made at the new Nescafe plant. You could buy an Oldsmobile across the street from the firehouse, but you could also buy a Farmall tractor on the street behind the courthouse, and you could still buy harnesses for your horses on Mechanic Street from Ed Jeffries, who had been making them in town for 60 years.

There were no gun-wielding bandits tying up the tellers and robbing the loan office on Main Street this month. The news in August had a more pastoral cast, closer to a South Jersey farm town than a North Jersey factory town. The high school was hosting the annual 4-H fair, with square dancing on Saturday night. Pete Connell and his Western Pals were playing at the Echo Club on Route 9 outside town with Yodeling Sam and Curley Joe every night but Tuesday. Abe Seidel lost his big chicken barn, and 500 of his 5,000 chickens, to a lightning strike, but 50 fellow farmers turned out to help him build a new one.

The rich loamy land around Freehold had been potato country for more than a century – it was why the rail line was first laid here in the 1850s, and why so many Irish immigrants, Bruce’s ancestors among them, came here after the potato famine in their home country. The farms were large, and migrant workers — BlackSoutherners mostly, but lately some Puerto Ricans, too — arrived each summer to work them, living in ramshackle labor camps, even the best of which offered little beyond “weatherproof shelters, electric lights and the minimum number of outdoor sanitary conveniences,” as Leonora Willette of the state’s Migrant Labor Board told the Transcript. Bruce’s grandfather Fred Springsteen – Bruce and his family were living with him and his wife. Alice, at 87 Randolph Street – circuited the camps, fixing and selling radios.

For six weeks during the peak harvest season, the Court Street School was home again to the Migrant Family Center, a flagship project sponsored by the state along with local churches and service organizations. The state legislature had cut the funding for the weekday school that 50 migrant children attended last summer, so the center was open only on weekends this summer, offering recreation and other activities meant, as the Transcript noted, to “provide somewhat of a home-like atmosphere to a segment of a population which cannot keep a real home during most of the year.”

About 1,600 migrant workers lived within a seven-mile radius of the Family Center, and about 10 percent of them registered there, according to Willette. “Not bad,” for a new project, she said, although she noted some “intra-racial problems” with the surrounding neighborhood of year-round Black townspeople, who remained “somewhat aloof” from the migrants. (Willette was not herself local. She lived in Belleville, up in Essex County, and had lost a son in the war: 2^nd Lt. Leonard Willette, a fighter pilot with the famed all-Black unit, the Tuskegee Airmen, shot down while escorting B-17 bombers on a mission over Germany. Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to the White House to receive condolences.)

As well-intentioned as the Family Center was, though, it couldn’t relieve all the harshness of life out in the migrant camps. Orabelle Davis was still in Fitkin Hospital in Neptune recovering from the fire in January that badly burned her and killed three of her children. James Elliott, 17, was in Monmouth Memorial Hospital in Long Branch, paralyzed after an older worker stabbed him in the head with the point of a file in an argument over a cigarette.

“State police said an examination revealed that the file penetrated two-and-a-half to three inches and entered the brain,” the Transcript reported.

And after a hot day in the fields, some migrant workers decided to cool off in an irrigation ditch, but it was deeper than they thought, eight feet, and one of them, Leroy Battles, didn’t come back up. The first aid squad found him after 45 minutes and tried to revive him. They couldn’t. He was just 16, and gone.

Every Wednesday night in the summer, when migrant workers swelled the local Black population, the Liberty Theatre on Main Street, the town’s second-run theater, screened what were known as “race movies,” low-budget films made for a Black audience and often advertised as having an “All Colored Cast.”

One of the Wednesday movies at the Liberty this month featured Kenny Washington as a college football star facing off against gamblers trying to fix a game.

Washington had in fact been a college athletic star himself, a teammate of Jackie Robinson in both football and baseball at UCLA and the nation’s leading scorer in 1939, but the NFL had no place for him then. Black players were banned from the league in 1933 – a few had played in the early years after its founding in 1920 – and Washington was left to play in a West Coast minor league. He finally made it to the NFL in 1946, when the Cleveland Rams, who moved to Los Angeles to play in the publicly owned Coliseum, bowed to pressure to sign him. He was one of the four Black players who re-integrated the NFL that year, but professional football was not nearly as popular as baseball then, and he attracted far less attention than his old teammate did the next year for joining the Brooklyn Dodgers

A week after Kenny Washington was on the screen at the Liberty, Jackie Robinson was on the screen at the Strand, the first-run theater next door to the courthouse, starring as himself in a full-fledged Hollywood production, “The Jackie Robinson Story,” which played the whole weekend, not just Wednesday night. And the two players who broke the color line in baseball locally, a decade before Robinson broke it nationally, were in the news this month with a plan to help give the next generation of ballplayers a chance they were denied themselves.

“Guggy Lewis and Hank Schank are forming a New Jersey All-Stars team, composed of many of this area’s best colored baseball players,” the Transcript reported. “After the squad is in action, Guggy hopes to get big league scouts to watch his group for any undiscovered star that might be around.”

Bell Finance was a small loan company that had recently moved into a narrow storefront office directly across Main Street from the library and a few doors down from the Strand Theater. At midmorning on Tuesday, July 18, three employees were at their desks behind the front counter that ran the width of the office: William Holden, the manager; Esther Kurman, the cashier; and Ida Kostuk, the secretary. Loan companies like Bell were where you went if you needed some cash between paydays, or you wanted to buy a television set and you didn’t think the bank would lend you the money. Interest rates were steeper but terms were easier, and you could walk out with fresh green in your pocket after signing a few papers.

It was a cloudy morning, cool for summer, not yet 70 but humid, the air heavy with the odor that residents had recently begun to complain about from the new Nescafe factory. The marquee at the Strand had just been changed to announce the movie that would be playing for the next three nights, “The Asphalt Jungle,” a hard-boiled noir about a jewel heist gone wrong. At 10:30, the door to Bell Finance opened, and a man came in wearing dark glasses and a hat. Two other men followed, also in dark glasses and hats, and the first man vaulted over the four-and-half-foot-tall counter. The three employees stood up and smiled, thinking it was a practical joke. But then they saw the pistol he was waving.

“He slapped my arm and said, ‘This is no joke,’” Kurman said later.

“Get in the back,” he told them.

He was the tallest, strongest, loudest and angriest of the three – “like a madman,” Kurman said – and he herded them through the door that led to the rear of the office, warning them to keep their faces toward the wall. One of the men stayed out front as a lookout, sitting in the waiting area like a customer. The other two tied ropes around the hands and feet of Holden and the two women. The second man was “gentle,” Kurman said, and asked several times if the rope was too tight.

Hands bound behind their backs, the three employees were directed by the gunman to shuffle toward the bathroom. As they passed a telephone mounted on the wall, Holden tried to shoulder the receiver off the hook to signal the operator. He heard the click of a gun.

“I’ll put a bullet through your head,” the leader told him. He gagged Holden with a handkerchief, tightened the ropes that bound him, ripped out the phone cord, and pushed the three into the bathroom.

The streetfront door of the loan office opened and a customer walked in, Thomas Oakes. He saw the third robber sitting near the entrance and presumed he was another customer, until he felt a gun against his back, prodding him toward the bathroom. He was tied up, too, and pushed inside with the others. The door didn’t lock, so the robbers braced it shut with a chair.

The foursome in the bathroom heard the robbers lock the door that led to the front of the office. A radio was still playing in the rear where they were, and soon that was the only sound they heard. The robbers were gone. Kurman and Oakes managed to free themselves, then untied Holden, who went out the back door and called the police from next door.

The robbers had taken the men’s wallets when tying them up ($30 in Holden’s, $10 in Oakes’) but took no jewelry from the women and left their pocketbooks untouched on their desks. They took $947.23 from the cash drawer of the loan company’s safe.

“Robbed by Bandits in Brazen Daylight Raid,” the Transcript headline blared.

Six days later, Holden and Oakes accompanied Special County Investigator George Dumont up to Union City to look at suspects in a police lineup. Dumont had read a newspaper story about the dramatic arrest of the gun-wielding driver of a stolen car after a hit-and-run crash and had a hunch that might be their man. Holden and Oakes took one look and said it was.

“You don’t forget when there’s a gun on you,” Holden said.

His name was George Zagorski – the heist leader who was “like a madman,” the bad guy in a scene that had played out on Main Street as if in a gangster movie at the Strand. But the movie wasn’t over yet. The plot was about to darken even deeper, because it turned out that the red-haired career criminal who was finally nabbed after the Bell Finance job in Bruce’s hometown – “Six-Gun Zagorski,” the “Jersey City Desperado,” the “One-Man Crime Wave,” as the newspapers variously dubbed him – might easily have ridden shotgun alongside the hard-bitten, hard-traveled, hard-falling characters on Bruce’s “Nebraska.”

“They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”

George Zagorksi of 80 Wayne Street in downtown Jersey City was 16 when he was arrested in November 1941 with three other teens for purse-snatching in Hoboken and sent to the Annandale Reformatory in Hunterdon County. Things only went further south from there.

He was 18 in March 1944 when he was arrested with his brother Joseph, 20, for dragging a man into their car, beating him and robbing him of a watch, a ring and $12. The Jersey Journal reported:

“According to police reports, the defendants, for some time, made a lucrative business in Hoboken of rolling helpless drunks and beating them mercilessly and also of mugging others. The police declare the muggers left their victims where they lay, heedless of whether they lived or died. The defendants used an auto in their forays.”

No juvenile detention this time. Zagorski was sentenced to eight to 10 years in state prison. (His brother, who had no prior record, got three years probation and a $250 fine.) An imposing figure at 6-foot-1 and 185 pounds, he starred on the prison baseball team and apparently acquired some new skills. In February 1950, just a few months after he was paroled, he was arrested as part of a five-man auto theft ring, but then jumped bail and started the four-month crime spree that led him to Bell Finance on Main Street.

It ended in the small hours of the Saturday night after the Freehold robbery.

Zagorski was careening through Union City past midnight in a stolen car with two younger men and a 15-year-old girl when he slammed into a car and kept right on going. A Union City patrol car responded. One officer stayed with the injured passengers, two of whom needed to get to the hospital. The other officer, George Schlemm, drove off to look for the hit-and-run car. Schlemm was flagged down by a witness to a second hit-and-run who said he saw four people get out of the car that did the hitting and take off on foot. Yes, he could identify them, he told Schlemm, and he got in the patrol car. They found the foursome at Palisades Avenue and Congress Street, just over the line in Jersey City.

“Put up your hands,” Schlemm ordered through his loudspeaker, and got out of the car with his gun drawn.

Zagorski held a large brown paper bag in his right hand. Inside were two Belgian Lugers, a .32 caliber revolver and a .38 caliber revolver. In his coat pockets were another .32, another .38 and 250 rounds of ammunition. The only reason he didn’t use them, he told Schlemm in the patrol car, was because he was caught off guard.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get your head blown off,” he told Schlemm.

Zagorski confessed to robbing nine loan offices between March 3 and July 18: Roselle Park, Newark, Fort Lee, Cranford, Little Falls, Caldwell, Nyack, Staten Island and his last stop, Freehold.

“Easy touches,” he called them. “When you want money, you go to a bank or a loan company. That’s what I did.”

His total haul was $13,780 in cash, $15,000 in government bonds and $1,600 in jewelry. As the Paterson News reported:

“He would swagger into an office and, in accepted movieland fashion, he would hurdle the counter or railing, brandish a brace of pistols in the air and announce his intent. Then Zagorski, or one of his henchmen, would herd the employees into a rear room and bind them with twine.”

Seven months later, on February 28, 1951, two guards drove Zagorski from Trenton State Prison to Hackensack for a court date in one of the armed robbery cases. On the way back they picked up two parole violators in Newark and handcuffed all three together in the back seat. Zagorski had slathered his wrists that morning with a greasy salve he was given for an ear infection. Taped to his back under his T-shirt was a crude 9-inch knife he had fashioned from a piece of metal he found in the trash several weeks earlier and kept hidden under his mattress for a moment like this. At a bathroom break he slipped the knife under his waistband.

Back in the car after a lunch stop at a diner in Linden he started trying to wriggle his greased wrists out of his handcuffs. He finally got loose on Route 25 in Raritan Township (what Edison was called then) just south of the Metuchen line. The knife was in his hand. Victor Viteritto was the guard in the passenger seat. Lester Throckmorton was at the wheel. Zagorski lunged forward, stabbing Viteritto in the neck and chest, and slashing Throckmorton across the stomach.

Throckmorton hit the brakes. He knew judo, and he grabbed Zagorski’s arm. The car door opened and the two fell, fighting, onto the lane-dividing island in front of Meow’s Tourist Cabins. Zagorski broke free and dashed across the northbound lanes and into the fields. Throckmorton fired five shots, hitting him once in the leg.

Viteritto staggered out of the car and collapsed in front of the tourist cabins. The Raritan police arrived and set out after Zagorski. They found him hiding in the tall grass a quarter-mile away. Viteritto, 25, a World War II veteran, died several hours later at Middlesex General Hospital, his wife at his bedside.

Zagorski didn’t know of Viteritto’s death until he heard himself charged with murder at his arraignment that evening before Magistrate Christian Jorgensen. As the Daily Home News reported:

“Zagorski grabbed the desk and trembled.

’Did you say killed, Judge?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Jorgensen.

Zagorski, who had trouble standing on his injured leg, faltered and was grabbed by James A. Bates, county detective, who held him up during the remainder of the short court session.”

That moment of apparent surprise and remorse may have saved him from the electric chair at his trial a month later. His lawyer leaned hard on it as evidence that his actions lacked intent. Throckmorton testified that Zagorski had shouted “I’ll kill youse” as he leaned over with the knife, and the pathologist testified that “considerable force was necessary to cause both wounds.” Zagorski testified that he did not intend to kill anyone, that he had no memory of stabbing Vitoretti at all, that he had only planned to use the knife to jimmy open the window and escape at a red light and that a sudden stop had thrust him forward. The prosecution asked for a verdict of “first-degree murder without a recommendation of mercy,” which carried a mandatory death penalty. Zagorski breathed a sigh of relief when the jury returned a verdict of second-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to 29 years, on top of the 28 he was already serving for his other crimes.

Zagorski issued a statement after the trial:

“This was the first time since I was a kid and got in a jam that I was treated like a human being and not like a dog. Maybe if I’d had my first run-in with the law in this county I’d have not finished where I am now.”

In April 1974, George Zagorski was released on parole after serving 23½ years in state prison, but old ways die hard. In February 1975 he was arrested for the robbery of a bank courier in Somerville. Sentenced to another 20 years, he escaped in June 1981 from the minimum-security camp at Rahway State Prison. Three months later he was sitting in a car in Jersey City eating an ice cream sundae when he was recognized by an off-duty police officer who had once been a prison guard. In the car with him was a loaded .45 and 21 stolen credit cards

Zagorski went back in, but by 1985 he had been released again and was living in Brick, near a liquor store where a brown and black mixed-breed dog named Radar greeted customers inside and sometimes wandered around outside. The store owner described Radar as “very friendly, very smart and very popular.” On November 14, a customer at a neighboring video store saw Zagorski drop to one knee behind the liquor store, fire a single shot from a long-barreled .22 caliber handgun at Radar and then “nonchalantly walk away. It didn’t even faze him.” The dog yelped, ran to the front of the store and lay down, bleeding from the neck. Radar died at an animal hospital.

“No motive was ever given by the authorities for the shooting,” the Asbury Park Press reported. “He showed little trace of emotion when the jury convicted him of a charge that carried a maximum sentence of 10 years.”

And that’s just what the judge gave him – 10 years. It was George Zagorski’s final crime, near the end of a life bedeviled by the meanness in this world. He died at the age of 73 in 1998, a man who showed as little mercy to a dog as he once complained the state of New Jersey had shown him.

The color guard, flag-bearing veterans of the nation’s most recent war, started their march in front of the austere white-shingled church that crowned a gentle hill amid the farmland four miles outside town. Age-darkened gravestones surrounded the church on all sides, as if assembled for an eternal revival meeting. Buried under 70 of those stones were veterans of the nation’s first war, the American Revolution. Buried in a common grave, their names unrecorded, were an unknown number of Continental soldiers killed in one of the largest and most significant battles of that war, the Battle of Monmouth, to which Old Tennent Church had stood witness and 1,500 people had come today to remember for its 172^nd anniversary.

The color guard continued down the slope through the cemetery to a speakers’ platform that had been set up beside a colonnade monument to yet another war, the First World War. Several hundred soldiers from Fort Monmouth paraded past the platform in review. The fort’s band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Coronation March” and “War March of the Priests.” The Manasquan Men’s Chorus shifted to a more somber key, singing “The Lord’s Prayer,” “Recessional” and “There is No Death.” Two members of Congress were on the platform, and after the invocation by Old Tennent’s pastor, the first of them spoke.

“Right here on this ground was fought one of the most decisive battles in history – so that our children might enjoy personal freedom,” said Rep. James C. Auchincloss, a Republican from the patrician enclave of Rumson whose district included Freehold.

It was just past 2:30 on a hot Sunday afternoon, June 25, almost the same moment that Harry S. Truman’s presidential plane – “The Independence,” named for his Missouri hometown, where he had hoped to spend a quiet weekend – was taking off from the Kansas City airport on a hurriedly arranged flight back to Washington. The previous evening, as Truman was preparing for bed, he had received a phone call from Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

“Mr. President, I have very serious news,” Acheson told him. “The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”

Like America before the Revolution, Korea had long been a colony, ruled by Japan until the end of World War II, when it was divided along the 38^th parallel: the Soviet Union occupied the North, the United States the South. By 1950, Soviet and American troops had left, but North Korea was controlled by a government that hoped to reunify the nation under a Communist regime; the South was controlled by a fiercely anti-Communist government with reunification hopes of its own; and the newly formed United Nations had been unable to broker an agreement that satisfied both.

And then in the middle of the night, 26 hours before the color guard stepped off at Old Tennent, “North Korea struck like a cobra,” as General Douglas MacArthur later wrote: Signaled by bugle calls, 90,000 North Korea troops stormed into the South, armed with Soviet-made howitzers, mortars, anti-aircraft guns and T-34 tanks.

“My father made it clear, from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening of World War III,” Truman’s daughter, Margaret, later wrote.

Truman wanted to return to Washington immediately, but Acheson advised waiting until they knew more; a night flight was risky, and would signal panic. As noon approached on Sunday, a telegram arrived in Independence from the American ambassador in Seoul: “It would appear from the nature of the attack and manner in which it was launched that it constitutes an all-out offensive against the Republic of Korea.”

As Truman flew toward Washington, Auchincloss introduced the day’s main speaker at Old Tennent, Katharine St. George, a Congresswoman who shared grandparents with Franklin D. Roosevelt – they were first cousins on their mothers’ side – but not political parties: She was a Republican, from another patrician enclave, Tuxedo Park, New York. She opened by praising the president all parties could agree on, George Washington, who had commanded the Continental Army at the battle here.

“We see in Washington the heart and soul of the American Revolution, and we see why this revolution was different from any other that followed,” St. George said.

She didn’t say what other revolution she was comparing America’s to, but what she did say was pointed enough to leave little doubt about which one she meant: the Russian Revolution that had created the Soviet Union, our ally in the last war but our enemy now in the Cold War.

“This was not a revolt of downtrodden, starving peasants demanding food and the good things of life that had been denied them by a proud aristocracy” – not like in the Soviet Union, as she didn’t say, but as everyone heard.

“No, this was a revolution of men who believed in freedom and in the dignity of the individual. Men who believed truly that man is created in the likeness of God” – not like in the Soviet Union, as she didn’t say, but as everyone heard.

“These men and women did not fight for security – they fought for liberty and justice” – not like in the Soviet Union, as she didn’t say, but as everyone heard.

“And today when I hear people comparing the revolutionists of Europe with George Washington, my gorge rises. It is a sacrilege. It is like comparing a paid social worker to Christ the Lord.”

Communism was America’s enemy now, and the threat of its spread in Asia was what Truman and his advisors weighed after he arrived in Washington that evening – after four wreaths were laid at the Old Tennent monument to the war that President Woodrow Wilson had called “the war to end all war”; after a volley of four shots by a Fort Monmouth firing squad; after a bugler sounded taps; and after a benediction by the fort’s chaplain.

Europe was where Truman had expected the fight against Communism to erupt, but it was Seoul that Soviet-made tanks were rolling toward now. As he wrote later in his memoirs:

“If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threats and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors. If this was allowed to go unchallenged, it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.”

By Tuesday the United Nations had ordered an immediate ceasefire, encouraged its members to “furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the attack and to restore international peace and security to the area,” and Truman had committed American air and naval forces to the South’s defense. By Wednesday, Seoul had fallen to the North. By Friday, Truman had agreed to send ground troops into a U.N. “police action,” as he termed it, that looked indistinguishable from a war.

The Transcript’s editorial page applauded Truman for standing up against “the insidious Russian-sponsored attack by North Korea on her southern neighbor” after having stood aside for too long, in its opinion, as Eastern Europe fell under Soviet domination – “governments organized by the most brutal and totalitarian methods since Genghis Khan swept across Asia to the gates of Christendom.”

The aircraft observation post atop the rug mill was back in operation, staffed by volunteers scanning the sky for enemy planes again, as they had during the last war. Siegfried Peterson, the chief observer, estimated that he would need 200 observers in all to keep the town’s eyes peeled for danger around the clock.

There were no further sightings of flying saucers, but there were rising worries about what other uninvited visitors might appear in the sky. The Soviet Union had an atomic bomb now, too – it had tested its first one nine months earlier – and the fear was that our former ally and present enemy might drop one on us. Freehold formed a civil defense committee, like every other municipality in New Jersey, following an executive order from Governor Alfred E. Driscoll:

“Development of atomic weapons has already demonstrated that any future conflict will involve the entire population as well as the armed forces of the nation and there exists a clear need for the establishment and coordination of adequate civil defense activities in the state and local governments.”

The war was five years past, and the honor roll at the courthouse had deteriorated so much that the town council finally voted to remove it, although they still hadn’t decided how to more lastingly remember those who served. The latest proposal was to build a park as a “living memorial” at Lake Topanemus (later the inspiration for Greasy Lake in Bruce’s “Spirit in the Night”); a rattlesnake had just been spotted there, though, not an encouraging omen. In this new Cold War, the armory on Jerseyville Avenue was designated as the command post for Monmouth and Ocean counties, and the roof of the rug mill was again pressed into duty as an aircraft observation post.

Freehold was a close neighbor to the armed forces, and to mark “National Defense Week,” just ahead of Memorial Day, the surrounding installations all opened their gates to show civilians how the military was protecting them. To the north, the Earle Naval Ammunition Depot displayed some of the ordnance that was stored in bunkers throughout the sprawling woods in the middle of the county; opened the secure road that connected the bunkers to the pier that stretched more than two miles into Sandy Hook Bay; and then bused visitors out onto the pier itself. To the south, at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, the airships emerged from their towering hangars and hovered quietly; helicopters swooped and fluttered noisily; and parachute jumpers floated down from the sky. The slogan for the day there was “Teamed for Defense.”

To the east at Fort Monmouth, the home of the Army Signal Corps, the exhibits included “a model used in the explanation of splitting the atom”; “a radar unit used in the defense of London and Antwerp and responsible for the shooting down of 102 German buzz bombs”; and, most presciently, a “video-telephone, which may prove to be the telephone of the future, as the person speaking see each other.”

The post theater overflowed for the keynote address by Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York, so powerful and influential he was known as “the American pope,” and a crowd of 1,500 stood outside listening on loudspeakers. (A larger theater at the fort, built later, was a favored rehearsal hall for Bruce and the E Street Band before several tours.)

“America, strong and united, must stand sentinel against all perils that endanger her liberties.” Spellman said. “If America’s light of liberty shall fail, true peace upon the earth will never dawn.”

After his speech, Spellman toured the exhibits – whether he tried the “video-telephone” is not recorded – and reviewed the garrison parade, 10,000 soldiers marching in his honor.

The perils Spellman spoke of were sometimes hard to discern, like the ones that kept arriving at 9 First Street, Herbert Anson’s house directly behind the rug mill where he long worked. After the war, Anson had written to his relatives in Latvia – the Baltic nation he emigrated from at 17 in 1906, now locked behind the Iron Curtain – to see if they had survived. They had, they wrote back, but they could use some medicines they couldn’t get in Latvia. They were especially interested in streptomycin, the antibiotic discovered a few years earlier at Rutgers University. (So groundbreaking was this discovery that the microorganism from which the drug was isolated, Streptomyces griseus, was officially designated the New Jersey state microbe in 2019.)

Anson sent $100 worth of streptomycin and other medicines to Latvia. In response came a telegram asking for more, and then more letters, with the same request. He grew suspicious. “I don’t want to send it if someone else gets it, and there is no guarantee who gets it,” he said.

A doctor told him to stop, that he had already sent more than his relatives could have used. Then he learned he wasn’t the only American receiving these requests from relatives in the Baltic nations.

“There is no question that Russia is attempting to strip America of these drugs,” an official from the Lithuanian American Information Service said, noting how many others had also sent drugs, and warning against sending any more. “It is apparent that the drugs already sent in response to pleas are falling directly into government hands.”

But was a more placid postwar world order possible, with no need for atomic bombs or international drug scams? Two Princeton University students came to the Rotary Club’s weekly luncheon at the American Hotel to argue that it was. “To preserve the peace and prevent any further wars” – that was the goal of the United World Federalists, the movement they were representing. They had the support, they said, of about a quarter of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for their campaign “to have the majority of the people of all nations in accord on the necessity for the transformation of the United Nations into a federated world government.”

The Rotarians were already doing their part locally to promote good will and harmony by sponsoring their second annual “Baseball Cavalcade,” a bus trip for local boys to Shibe Park in Philadelphia to see the Athletics play the Detroit Tigers. They had expected 125 boys, but 175 signed up, and they had to hire extra buses. It was Connie Mack’s 50^th and final season managing the Athletics, who lost, 6-1.

At Lincoln Field, it was Guggy Lewis’ 20^th season on a local baseball team. He was 40 and still patrolling centerfield for the Gulistans in the Jersey Shore Baseball League. Bruce’s cousin Dem Cashion hit a home run in each of the Gulistans’ first three games – two first-inning blasts to get the team started, and then a ninth-inning walk-off to win their third straight game.

But the best baseball story was unfolding at the high school field.

Last season, when he was just a sophomore, Ira Matthews was Freehold’s ace. In April he no-hit Manasquan. In August he was one of 60 patients in the polio ward at Monmouth Memorial Hospital in Long Branch.

“One of the finest hurlers at the Shore last year, the little hurler with the sizzling fast ball nearly had his promising career ended when he contracted the dread disease last year,” the Asbury Park Press reported. “But the kid had plenty of heart. He fought back, regained his health, and exercised all winter to strengthen the muscles in his back which were affected by the malady.”

He opened this season by striking out 10 Red Bank Catholic batters, giving up just four hits – getting three himself, two of them doubles – “and dispelled any doubts as to his condition” in a 9-1 win. He struck out 16, gave up only two hits, and hit a grand slam in an 8-1 win over Leonardo. He gave up no hits at all in a rain-shortened six-inning 5-0 win over Rumson.

“It’s like starting all over again,” he told the Press.

Robert Rothfuss was out walking near his home in rural Cassville after dinner on a clear April evening when, about half an hour after sunset, an unfamiliar shape high above him caught his attention. A “disk-like object,” as he later described it to the Transcript, was moving across the dusk sky. He was initially “skeptical,” he said, that it was anything worth troubling over, and he kept walking. When he got home, he and his mother walked over to his aunt’s house, which offered an enticing reason to visit: a television set. Fewer than one in 10 American households had one at the time.

Rothfuss, who was 25, and his mother watched his aunt’s television for about 45 minutes, and then walked back home. The sky was darker now. He saw the disk again. So did she. It made no noise, left no vapor trail, moved at a moderate speed.

“Both he and his mother watched the object again for about eight minutes before it disappeared to the north. They both think they might have seen a flying saucer.”

The chances of seeing something unusual in the sky were greater in Cassville than on Main Street in Freehold, about 12 miles to the north. Cassville was home to a community of Russan emigres, centered around an onion-domed Orthodox church that rose incongruously on the edge of the vast, empty Pine Barrens, and not far from the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, where the Hindenburg had crashed 13 years earlier. Officials at Lakehurst said that no one there had seen anything, and its radar was not operating that night. It had sent up two weather balloons, though, one at 4:55 p.m. and another at 8, “cream-colored with orange-red parachutes, which ease the fall of the attached equipment.” The balloons typically stayed aloft for about two hours. Maybe, the officials suggested, that was what Mr. Rothfuss and his mother saw.

“Mr. Rothfuss reported, however, that the second time he saw the disk it was definitely being maneuvered – first traveling southeast then west then finally veering to the north. He added that he was amazed by the flight pattern of the object as it would stop in midair and then swoop ahead suddenly.”

The world had been knocked so far off its foundations by the war that its inhabitants had become accustomed to encountering the unaccustomed. If a nation could murder millions of civilians in death camps, what other evil might be lurking ahead? If whole cities could now vanish under a mushroom cloud, what other destruction might rain down from above? The first flying saucer sighting in the United States was in Washington state in 1947, and hundreds more soon followed, eventually spawning a whole genre of UFO movies. The movie considered the first of them – “The Flying Saucer,” which doubled as a cautionary Cold War tale, pitting American spies against Soviet spies on the trail of a saucer in Alaska – had played at the Strand for the first time the same week as the Cassville sighting, on a double bill with “The Gal Who Took the West.”

The future was both a threat and a promise in the Atomic Age, a time defined by and named for a particle no one could see. Atoms were the subject of the weekly luncheon of the Rotary Club at the American Hotel, where the commander of the nearby Earle weapons depot assured the Rotarians that no mushroom clouds would rise within sight of Main Street.

And atoms were the symbol for the annual Cavalcade of Progress at Convention Hall in Asbury Park.

The Cavalcade filled Convention Hall – the cavernous boardwalk venue where Bruce would one day see The Doors play, and where he would eventually play himself – with exhibitors’ booths: oil burners, televisions, aluminum storm windows, vacuum cleaners, free chest X-rays. High school bands played, and the local radio station, WJLK, broadcast live from inside. There was nothing atomic about the event, except that it was trying to harness the energy of a nation bent on making up for the years lost to the Depression and the war.

Building was the measure of progress – new businesses, new homes, new industries. “The growth in our community has more than doubled in its pace,” the Transcript enthused in a recent editorial. “Its future is unlimited.” Two auto dealers, a farm equipment dealer, two gas stations, a plumbing contractor, a coal dealer, a lumber yard, two furniture stores, a haberdasher, a dry cleaner, a coal dealer, even a record store – all new or expanding. The rug mill was adding a five-story wing for the 12-foot Axminster looms that wove the wall-to-wall carpet that was increasingly in demand. The Dolly Madison restaurant on East Main Street added a second-floor banquet room with 150 seats and a knotty-pine service counter.

But as the Transcript editorial also noted, Freehold was “centrally located in one of the more fertile areas of the nation.” To get to the Cavalcade of Progress in Asbury Park – or to shop for the latest fashions at Steinbach’s five-story department store, or to hear Frank Sinatra or Benny Goodman or any of the other national acts that played Convention Hall – you had to cross 15 miles of farmland. If you stuck closer to home you could attend a screening of “King Apple” at the Grange hall, “an educational as well as entertaining film” about the leading local orchard crop; or you could catch Shorty Warren again, who was back at the Echo Club this month; or you could check out the act that followed him there, the Korn Kobblers, a comic washboard band in overalls and flannel.

Klaus Zwilsky’s classmates at Freehold High School – the ones who elected him vice president of their senior class, and who considered him the smartest among them – knew that his life before high school had been different than theirs. Just how different became much clearer when the Transcript interviewed him for a story this month.

“Klaus, a dark quiet lad with an engaging smile, has made a hit in Freehold, and Freehold – and America for that matter – have made a hit with him. Now a senior in Freehold high School, Klaus Zwilsky, who seems older than his years and who has seen and lived through horrors some of us Americans have only read about, is humble and overwhelmed at the way Americans have treated him and his family.”

The war was five years past, but what it wrought remained all around. The Navy had commandeered a huge swath in the middle of the county as a weapons depot during the war and had just announced, to the dismay of local motorists, that Asbury Avenue – once a favored road Shore-ward that cut through the depot – would remain closed to civilians. The men’s club at the synagogue watched a film of an atom bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and heard an accompanying talk by an Army officer attached to the Manhattan Project who had witnessed it. Louis Wagner, who lived across the street from the Springsteens on Randolph Street, told a fellowship meeting at the Presbyterian Church about his recent service as an Air Force flight dispatcher at Tempelhof Airport during the Berlin Airlift last year, when C-47 transport planes were landing every 45 seconds to deliver food and supplies to West Berlin, which had been blockaded by the Soviets.

“Such inspiring spirit and teamwork cannot be obtained from regimented nations,” the youth said. “If I were Stalin or one of the men of the Politburo, I would fear it more than the atom bomb for it is a weapon they will never be able to duplicate.”

And walking the halls of Freehold High School every day was a student who had arrived in town from Berlin just a few years earlier, and was one of the few Jews to survive the war there.

Klaus Zwilsky was born in Berlin in 1932, six months before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. He was the only child of Erich and Ruth Zwilsky, who both trained as pharmacists. Erich had served in the German army in the First World War, but lost his job as the laws against Jews tightened and he was no longer permitted to work in a non-Jewish pharmacy; Ruth, who was younger, was not even permitted to take the licensing exam. But because there remained in Berlin during the war a category of German Jews the Nazis were more ambivalent about killing – those who had only one Jewish parent, or who were themselves married to a non-Jew – there also remained the Jewish Hospital, which was staffed by Jews. Erich Zwilsky was hired as the pharmacist there. As Klaus told the Transcript:

“Oh, he was so lucky to get that job. If he hadn’t we’d all be dead.”

The family lived in the hospital, but it was a tenuous refuge. The hospital fell under the jurisdiction of Adolph Eichmann, who occasionally visited to select patients and staff for transport to the death camps. Ruth Zwilsky was a forced laborer at a Siemens plant and then at a factory that made military uniforms; she secretly baked matzo for Passover. Klaus was not permitted to attend school; he became his own teacher. Allied bombing raids sent them sheltering in the cellar. So many raids passed with no deaths at the hospital that the neighbors came to believe it was shielded by God, and pleaded with the Gestapo to let them shelter there, too.

“We could feel the walls shake, and the lights went out. One bomb fell only ten yards from me,” Klaus told the Transcript.

Deliverance finally came in the form of the Russian army.

“We later learned that we were to have been killed by the Nazis April 26, 1945. But on April 24^th the Russians showed up and saved us.”

The three Zwilskys were among about 800 Jews still at the hospital when Berlin was liberated. Most of Erich and Ruth’s siblings and extended family did not survive the war. Three months later, Berlin’s first postwar bar mitzvah was celebrated at the hospital’s synagogue: Klaus Zwilsky.

Erich Zwilsky continued to work at the hospital for another year, until the family finally managed to leave Germany, first to Sweden and then to the United States, sponsored by a sister of Ruth’s who had a chicken farm in Lakewood. Erich got a job as a pharmacist at the state psychiatric hospital in Marlboro, and the family moved to 77 Throckmorton Street in Freehold. Ruth worked at Picadilly Frocks, one of the small garment factories in town, and joined Local 85 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the same union as my grandmother, who worked in one of the other factories.

And Klaus quickly made his mark at Freehold High School. He started as a sophomore in the fall of 1947, and he earned A’s in all his classes in his first semester, the only sophomore to make the honor roll. The school librarian was especially helpful to him in that first year, as he remembered fondly in his 40^th class reunion report, and he was helpful to her, volunteering as an aide there. He was on the tennis team, the yearbook staff and the prom committee.

He traveled to Temple University to participate with other high school students from New Jersey and Pennsylvania in a model Congress; they discussed the Marshall Plan, which was helping to rebuild the nation that had almost killed him. He was one of just 14 boys in the county chosen to attend Boys State at Rutgers University, the week-long summer conference on citizenship sponsored by the American Legion. And when the Voice of America broadcast a story about Freehold’s distinctive Halloween tradition of high school students painting on the downtown store windows, Klaus was one of the students who explained it to an international audience. He spoke in German.

In his interview with the Transcript, Klaus had one overriding impression of America:

“Freedom of speech – that’s what impresses me most about this wonderful country of yours,” he said. “You can call a Senator a dope and get away with it.”

After he graduated a few months later, Klaus went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he ultimately earned a doctorate in metallurgical engineering. He became a prominent metallurgist – his work instrumental in the development of jet engines, marine turbines, submarine hulls and nuclear reactors – and served a term as president of ASM International, the professional association of materials engineers and scientists. He was the original inspiration to the author of a book about the Jewish Hospital, and was recently the subject of a short documentary.

Klaus’ father died in 1961, but his mother continued to live at 63 South Street, across the street from the Springsteens, until shortly before her death in 1986. The yellow star he had to wear as a boy in Berlin is now in the collection of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington.

At 1 in the afternoon on the first Sunday in February, police halted traffic on Main Street long enough to allow the funeral cortege of Joe Levy to pass slowly through the town he had served as faithfully as he once served the nation. He had earned a Distinguished Service Cross – the Army’s second-highest decoration, behind only the Medal of Honor – in the First World War, and the members of the Freehold Jewish War Veterans post marched with the hearse that carried him from the funeral parlor to the new synagogue on Broad Street. (The old one behind the rug mill had been repurposed as the union hall for Local 26.)

Levy was an auto dealer whose Buick showroom on Main Street, H.L. Zobel Company, was across the street from the library and just a few doors down from Freeman Funeral Home, where hundreds of mourners had come to pay their respects over the past two days. He also sold GMC trucks and had a second showroom in Bradley Beach, successful enough in business to have a winter home in Miami Shores, where he had mostly been since just after Thanksgiving. He had a cabin cruiser, too, and as the captain steered it toward Bimini for a fishing trip on Wednesday morning, Levy eased back in a chair and draped a newspaper over his face against the sun to take a nap. “He never woke up,” the Freehold dealership manager told the Transcript. Dead of a heart attack at 61.

Levy was a borough councilman for 16 years, and belonged to a host of civic and fraternal organizations, several of which held services at the funeral home: the Elks, the Masons, the Rotary. He was a past commander of Post 54 of the American Legion, the veterans organization founded in the wake of the war that was supposed to end all war, but hadn’t. A Legion honor guard stood at Freeman’s all through the visiting hours. In his will, Levy bequeathed his Distinguished Service Cross to the Monmouth County Historical Association.

He was a supply sergeant with Company B, 311^th Infantry Regiment, 78^th Division, and saw the heaviest action in the fall of 1918 at St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne, the final Allied offensive that ended at least this one war. His award citation read:

“With utter disregard for his own safety, Sergeant Levy repeatedly led details through heavy enemy artillery and machine-gun fire, carrying rations to the hungry and exhausted men in the advanced positions. Again and again he carried wounded men under the hottest enemy fire to dressing stations with complete contempt for personal danger. The consistently heroic conduct of Sergeant Levy throughout this combat service served as an example of soldierly conduct to the men of his company.”

The unit history of Company B took a more personal tone:

I looked at the men lying on the ground asleep—the only ones available. They had been carrying all that awful night under the heavy shell fire, and I had not the heart to order them to make the trip again. But I woke them up and told them that D Co. had some men lying wounded, and asked for volunteers to take them in.

They stared dully for a moment, too tired to understand. Then Joe Levy, who had been on the go all night, dragged himself to his feet, and said “Hell, I’ll go. Come on, fellows.” Nobody wanted to go, and nobody pretended to. But they went. It was one of the finest things I ever saw, and every man that went should have had a D. S. C.

A Jewish war hero accorded a heartfelt communal farewell that paid no attention to religious differences – it was much in keeping with National Brotherhood Week, which fell in February each year. Started in the 1930s by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, National Brotherhood Week ultimately became the punchline of a satirical song by Tom Lehrer, but through the war and the years after it was an earnest and widespread attempt to set the United States apart from the rest of the world as a pluralistic and tolerant nation. Tolerant about religion, that is. Look at the hands holding the flag:

National Brotherhood Week was aimed mostly at religious, not racial, prejudice. When the Transcript asked local clergymen for their thoughts on Brotherhood Week, they mostly defaulted to platitudes about respect for each other’s religious beliefs. Rev. T.M. Jones of Second Baptist church had a spikier response, invoking a word the others shied from: “hatred.”

Brotherhood was less in evidence at the high school one Thursday this month during what the principal described as a “periodic song fest” in the auditorium, where “students spend the entire assembly period singing songs taken from an accredited school song book.” One of those songs caused “a limited number of students of a minority group,” as the Transcript put it, to get up and leave.

“While the orchestra played and students sang ‘Old Black Joe,’ a well known and well loved Negro spiritual, one girl walked out of the auditorium by herself. She was quickly followed by a few others.”

“Old Black Joe” was not a “well loved Negro spiritual.” It dates to 1860, the eve of the Civil War, an elegiac ballad in the voice of an old Black man facing his death – written by a white composer, Stephen Foster, who was to 19^th-century American popular music what Irving Berlin was to the 20^th century. It doesn't explicitly identify Joe as a slave, but a Black man in the antebellum South reminiscing about his “friends from the cotton fields” could hardly be anything but. It was often performed at minstrel shows that put white performers in blackface to caricature Blacks, but it has also been widely recorded by singers ranging from Bing Crosby to Jerry Lee Lewis. Even Paul Robeson lent his resonant bass voice to the song, but changed it to “Poor Old Joe.”

The song was played a second time at the assembly, and more students walked out, “due to the fact that other students made fun of them.”

The principal, Lloyd Cassel, met with students and then told the Transcript:

“As a result of conferences, the incident is being adjusted,” Mr. Cassel said. “School officials regret that this assembly may have caused a misunderstanding on the part of some of the students enrolled in the high school.”

Adele Springsteen got another night out, and another tomato pie, with the ladies from her office. One of the other women at the Monmouth County Realty Abstract Company was getting married soon, so Adele and 11 of her coworkers feted her at a dinner at the Molly Pitcher hotel in Red Bank.

“Following the dinner the group attended a movie in Red Bank after which they enjoyed a tomato pie supper at the Magnolia Inn, Matawan.”

Donald Springsteen, Douglas’ cousin from around the corner on Marcy Street, was an usher in a wedding at St. Rose – my uncle and aunt, Gene and Barbara Coyne. (Gene would return the honor and serve as an usher when Donald got married a few years later.)

The longtime neighbor three doors down from the Springsteens on Randolph Street turned 80 this month. The whole town knew, because almost every year on George Gatlin’s birthday the Transcript did another feature story about the man it called “the world renowned driver and horse trainer of long ago.” Gatlin had lived in the house at 93 Randolph Street since he was 7 years old, almost as long as Douglas Springsteen’s family had lived in their house at 87 Randolph.

Horses had been racing in Freehold since before the Civil War, longer than at any other harness track in America, and George Gatlin had followed his father into the family trade of training and driving them. It was common then for Black men to drive the sulkies that the trotters and pacers pulled, and George started racing as a teenager. He quickly became a fixture at racetracks throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and as far as Baltimore.

In winter, trainers fitted their horses with cleated shoes, harnessed them to light sleighs called cutters and raced them on the icy streets. Gatlin apparently had a habit of racing even when he had no opponents. His local celebrity did not buy him immunity from the traffic laws, though. In February 1907 he was arrested for “speeding his horse on the streets.”

“Mr. Gatlin was taken before Justice of the Peace Hulse, where, when asked why he was exceeding the limit, he stated that one of the Town Commissioners had told him to trot as fast as he wished. This situation caused Justice Hulse to lay the matter over for a short time while he communicated with the Commissioners, He was directed by the police committee to enforce the ordinance. The penalty is $5 fine.”

Gatlin was a skilled baseball player, too, a star catcher for two local teams. When he retired from racing he worked as a custodian for the Catholic church at the end of the block, St. Rose of Lima. The racetrack gave him a season pass each year and he spent each day of the annual meet there.

“I only wish I could drive just once more around the Freehold raceway and add another shoe to my collection,” he told the Transcript.

He was a familiar presence on his front porch, finding “his greatest comfort reminiscing over the days when racing was the nation’s favorite sport.” He delighted in showing his trophy board, where he had mounted the shoes of the horses that gave him the best stories to tell.

The home where John and Orabelle Davis lived with their five young children in farm country 10 miles outside town made the small houses on Randolph Street look grand by comparison. It was 15 feet square, divided into two rooms by wallboard that didn’t reach the ceiling, heated by a wood-fueled potbelly stove – a surplus Army barrack with no running water that shared a couple of outhouses and water pumps with 27 other barracks in a migrant labor camp on a 70-acre farm on Bergen Mills Road in Millstone.

Surrounding Freehold in all directions were the fields that made New Jersey the Garden State. Potatoes were the main crop locally, but farms also grew what were called “truck crops for fresh markets” – sweet corn, tomatoes, green peppers, asparagus, snap beans and thousands of bushels of other produce that traveled to New York, Philadelphia and all the other neighboring cities. Truck farms covered almost 100,000 acres of this small state, ranking it fifth in the nation, behind only the vastly larger states of California, Texas, Florida and New York.

Black migrant workers picked much of that harvest, and many of them lived in camps like the one where the Davis family lived. (Fred Springsteen visited the camps to sell and repair radios, and later sometimes took along his grandson, Bruce.) Some of the farm workers returned to the South for the winter, but some stayed and picked up other work until the next season. John Davis had recently been laid off from a job laying pipe for a housing project up in East Orange.

New Year’s Day was a Sunday, and Orabelle’s sister, Ann Tatum, came over with her husband and two toddlers from their own small home in nearby Englishtown. The two fathers were outside with two of the older children. The two mothers were inside with the rest of the children. The house was cold, and Orabelle tried to make it warmer.

“State police said that Mrs. Davis started the fire in the stove after pouring kerosene on it from a can,” The New York Times reported. “Then, in some unexplained fashion, the can was overturned and the kerosene remaining in it poured into the fire and splashed on the floor. The explosion followed”

“Flames spread all over all at once,” Ann Tatum told the Asbury Park Press. “It looked like the stove had just busted open.”

The fire instantly engulfed the children before anyone could reach them. Orabelle ran out the only door, her clothes aflame. Three of her children died: Frances, 6; Earl, 2; and Betty Jean, 5 months. Ann escaped through a window with minor burns. Both of her children died: Geraldine, 2; and Cornell, 1.

Nothing was left of the house but ashes.

“I don’t know what to do now,” John Davis told the Press. “All we’ve got is what you see on me and my kids. Lord knows I could use anything anyone could give me.”

As he spoke, his two surviving sons stood beside him. As the Press reported:

The smaller boy, William, hours after the fire, still clutched a small campaign-style hat, his only possession left him by the flames.

Orabelle Davis was taken to Fitkin Hospital in critical condition with first, second and third degree burns over much of her body. She spent the next eight months there. The children were buried in Maplewood Cemetery.

“In our county there are many hundreds living in homes like this fire trap. Mostly the Negro people are condemned to raise their families in these places which cannot be dignified with the name of homes,” one Transcript reader wrote in a letter to the editor. “Why should innocent children die for lack of a decent safe place to live?... Surely this is a blot upon our American way of life.”

The Transcript’s own editorial writer had little to say about the fire, but a Newark-based columnist for The Afro-American, a national newspaper based in Baltimore, most emphatically did:

“Still, greedy owners of slum, fire-trap dwellings continue to reap a harvest in blood and profit, and public officials continue passing the buck in regard to fire safety regulations.”

And the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party, sent a reporter to interview the residents of what it called the “Jim Crow shanty community” where the five children died.

The story called the state’s camps “the ghetto racket,” and depicted the owner of the one in Millstone as a cigar-chomping driver of a shiny new Ford who, when asked about the fire, had just this to say: “Theres no accounting for people’s carelessness.”

And to the reporter’s suggestion that he let the tenants forgo rent for a few months so they could use the money instead to make repairs on the shacks, he said, “What are you – an agitator?”

One Saturday this month the Strand held a rare midnight screening: “Hollywood Burlesque,” a filmed performance of a burlesque show at the Hollywood Theater in San Diego. The late hour was not because of the comics or singers or dancers, but because the “daring strip-teasing darlings” took off not just their tops but, briefly, their pasties, too.

On Sunday, as if to repent for the sins of Saturday night, the Strand offered an alternate, more prudent depiction of American womanhood: “Adam’s Rib,” with Katharine Hepburn as a defense lawyer sparring in court with Spencer Tracy as her prosecutor husband. “The hilarious answer to the question – who wears the pants in your family?” as the tagline said.

New houses were rising at both ends of town, on the last few acres of farmland still left inside its tight borders – on the north side, past the high school, and on the south past Route 33, the state highway that ran from Trenton to Asbury Park.

And they couldn’t go up fast enough.

So little housing had been built through the Depression and the war that a U.S. Senate committee report two years earlier found that 6 million Americans were doubled up with friends and relatives, unable to find a place of their own, and that some returning veterans were living in places never meant to be lived in: “garages, coal sheds, chicken coops, barns, tool sheds, granaries, and smokehouses.”

One of those cramped households was at 87 Randolph Street, where Douglas and Adele Springsteen and their new baby were living with his parents in the rickety house that had been in his mother’s family for more than a century, with a single kerosene heater in the living room and a coal stove in the kitchen.

In response to the housing shortage, President Harry Truman had signed the Housing Act of 1949 in July – expanding public housing; putting mortgages for private homes within the reach of even more people; and establishing “as a national objective the achievement as soon as feasible of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” as he said at the signing.

The new houses on the north edge of town – 109 of them on 25 acres of flat farmland in a development optimistically named “Rolling Mead” – were going up fast, but not easy.

They were small and boxy like Monopoly-board pieces, similar to the 17,000 houses that were going up on farmland on Long Island in the first Levittown, and they were selling quickly: Several dozen sold in just two weeks back in June, before anything but a single model home had been built. Most of the buyers were local veterans, as was the developer himself. But water and sewer lines had to be laid, streets graded and paved, curbs and streetlights installed, and none of that was happening as quickly as the houses were selling.

By early December, 40 homes were up, 37 of them occupied by veterans, but the streets were unpaved and muddy. Heating oil trucks couldn’t make deliveries, and insurance companies, concerned that fire trucks couldn’t pass, were charging an extra $43 for annual fire insurance. Claude Cornell, an Army paratrooper during the war, led a delegation of six other veterans to a borough council meeting seeking some help. The longtime borough engineer, Walter Schiverea (Shiv-EAR-uh), promised to send four truckloads of gravel to shore up the street until it could be paved properly.

Walter Schiverea lived on the other side of town, but the street was important to him, too. He had owned some of the land that became Rolling Mead, and the main street through it was named Schiverea Avenue – in honor not of him but of his son, Douglas Schiverea. Twelve days before Christmas in 1943, a telegram from the War Department was delivered to Walter Schiverea at his office in the municipal building: Douglas was dead, killed on November 28 on the Italian front, where he was serving with an Army field artillery unit. He was 26. When the mail arrived at the Schiverea home on Park Avenue later that morning it brought a letter from Douglas, dated November 26: He had enjoyed Thanksgiving with his unit, he wrote, and Christmas packages were starting to arrive.

After the war, some of the American dead buried overseas were, at the request of their families, brought back to be buried at home. Douglas Schiverea’s body had come home in September 1948, five years after his death; on the same transport ship was the body of another local man killed in Italy just a few days after Schiverea, Anthony Pikulik.

One of the other streets in Rolling Mead was named Douglas Road.

Douglas Schiverea’s name, with a gold star beside it, was also on the honor roll that stood in front of the courthouse, a large sign that had been erected during the war listing all the local men and women who served. The honor roll was still there, but it needed painting, and it was incomplete – some names were missing, and some of those listed had been dishonorably discharged. The $75 the council budgeted for its maintenance was insufficient. The town would have to decide if the honor roll was still the best way to remember the war.

The honor roll looked particularly shabby after the courthouse Christmas tree went up beside it and the holiday lights were strung across Main Street. Frank Federici, the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce Christmas lighting committee, had collected $1,200 from the local merchants to pay for the installation, the electricity and the 300 bulbs that needed to be replaced since last year. Santa had ridden into town, waving along Main Street and greeting the mayor at the courthouse before installing himself at J.J. Newberry’s to hear the wishes of children from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. each weekday (with a break for dinner at 5:45), and then all day Saturday.

American Legion Post 54 sponsored its annual Christmas party for the patients at Briar Hill, the county-run nursing home where Bruce’s aunt Dora Kirby worked. One of the featured entertainers was Frank “Spoons” Manniello, who had played his spoons the previous December on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, a show many of the new televisions in town had been tuned to. Percussive musical talent ran in the family: Frank’s son, Vincent, became the drummer for the Castiles when Bart Haynes joined the Marines, and then later played drums for Bruce’s band Steel Mill.

And on the Tuesday evening before Christmas, Adele Springsteen got a night away from the little house on Randolph Street, traveling south to Peterson’s Sunset Cabin in Lakewood for the annual Christmas party and dinner with the 15 other women she worked with at the Monmouth County Realty Abstract company on Main Street.

“Gifts were exchanged and grab bag presents distributed,” the Transcript reported. “Following dinner the girls attended the motion picture ‘That Forsyte Woman’ in Lakewood, later enjoying an after-theatre snack of tomato pies.”

When Freehold was first occupied by Europeans in the late 1600s, it comprised fully a third of the county. But its borders narrowed incrementally over the next two centuries, as territory peeled away and organized as new towns. By 1919, Freehold Borough had shrunk to its present dimensions, just under two densely settled square miles, and had a new form of government. Voters elected a mayor for the first time then, and in every subsequent election there had been only one candidate on the ballot.

Until this year.

The mayors so far had all been Republicans, but after President Harry Truman’s surprise victory last November, the local Democrats decided to challenge the incumbent. It was a landmark political year in New Jersey, the first statewide election since the adoption of the progressive new state constitution in 1947, which outlawed segregation, thus forcing the closure of the Court Street School in town. Governor Alfred Driscoll, the liberal Republican who led the campaign for the constitution (and for whom the wide Parkway bridge over the Raritan River was later named), was running for reelection. At a meeting of the Freehold Colored Republican Club in the courthouse a week before the election, the local candidates made their case for Driscoll, and for themselves. As reported by the Asbury Park Press, one candidate…

“…asked the group whether they would let the mayor and council be run by the people or “from the back room of the American hotel.” He added they should look at the people attending the Democratic sessions and then “decide how you want to vote.”

It was a comment that hit a nerve in a town where Main Street was lined with the churches of white Protestants, while Catholics, Jews and Black Christians worshiped on side streets. The Democrats were doubly insulted – feeling tagged both as racist allies of the Jim Crow Democrats who controlled the states of the old Confederacy, antagonistic to the civil rights views of Northeastern Republicans; and as unwashed ethnic machine politicians unfit for public office. The Freehold Democratic Club took out an ad in the Transcript:

“As president of the Democratic Club and as an American I was stunned to think that a man whose forebears perhaps came over on the Mayflower should think that his ‘pedigree’ gives him the privilege to consider himself above his fellowmen to the extent that he looks down upon them.”

The Democrats demanded an apology, and countercharged that it was in fact the Republicans who were the backroom dealers, given their recent “secret meeting behind closed doors of Room 8, an upstairs bedroom in the American Hotel.”

“I point with pride to the genuine people who attend our meetings in the MAIN DINING ROOM of the American Hotel where all are welcome and where all who look may see. They are Americans, the rank and file of any community: professional men, business men, Civil Service and Government Employees, and rug mill workers who find time to take an active interest in the well being of their community. Veterans of World War 1 and 2, the heart and pulse of our Democracy. I am proud to associate with them openly. They are the life blood of our town and our country.”

The ad was signed by the club’s president, Elwood Brown, himself a World War I veteran and a rug mill worker, foreman of the shearing department, which made him my grandfather’s boss. He lived across the street from the mill with his wife, Dorothy; they had two sons and five daughters, one of whom, Marion, would soon marry an Army corporal who was stationed at Fort Momouth, Gordon Vinyard, better known to all as Tex, even though it was Oklahoma that he hailed from. Their wedding reception was at the union hall, and they moved into a house two doors down from her parents, where their living room eventually became the practice space for Bruce and the Castiles, the band she and Tex mentored and managed.

Turnout was high on Election Day: 3,057 of the town’s 3,894 registered voters. Fred Quinn, the incumbent Republican, remained mayor by just 109 votes, but Democrats won four seats on the six-person borough council.

Local veterans were feeling insulted, too. The town had always marked November 11, Armistice Day, with a parade, but last year’s had been anemic – sparse in both marchers and spectators, with stores along the route open for business as usual. The veterans thought the day had acquired even more meaning in the wake of the last war, and they wanted something larger and more respectful this year.

“This day was set aside as a day of humble Thanksgiving for the cessation of hostilities in World War I. Now it must serve a three fold purpose in that it is generally accepted to represent V-E Day and V-J Day as well,” they wrote.

They went to the Chamber of Commerce and asked that stores close in observance of the day. But when the chamber polled the merchants, a majority declined. The veterans, aggrieved, canceled the parade, and took out an ad in the Transcript to explain why.

Their complaint led to a compromise: The merchants agreed to close between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Armistice Day, and the parade went on – the high school band accompanying the veterans as they marched from the World War I memorial at Gere Park on Throckmorton Street to the World War II memorial at Elks Point, laying wreaths at both.

It was easier, apparently, to think about a long-past war that was safely part of history, rather than the recent war that remained a fraught part of daily life:

Were two British army cannons from the Battle of Monmouth hiding somewhere below ground on Joseph W. Taylor’s dairy farm? Contemporary accounts and maps of the battle had fueled longstanding speculation that they were – abandoned when the British left after the battle, and then gradually swallowed by the marshy land where they were stuck. High school classes and others had searched for them before, but found nothing. Now some signal corpsmen from Fort Monmouth were trying, using metal detectors that could read to about five feet down. Their efforts uncovered auto parts, license plates, tin cans, bits of wires, as well as some old family lore from curious locals – memories of cannonballs and swords turned up by plows, and passed-down tales of ancestors who hid valuables from the British: pewter plates in a well, jewelry buried in a box in a field, a barrel of salt meat camouflaged by the wood pile. An excavator dug deep at one promising spot, but found nothing. The cannons remained a mystery.

Clarence Springsteen, the brother of Fred, Bruce’s grandfather, died at just 48. He was, like Fred, an electrician, and lived just a block away on Marcy Street. He left behind his wife and two children who still lived at home. Two weeks after he was buried in Maplewood Cemetery, his widow placed this ad in the Transcript:

The high school football game on Thanksgiving was doubly notable this year – the largest crowd ever (2,500) and the first time it was broadcast on radio, WCAP and WJLK from Asbury Park. But the Colonials lost to Neptune, 32-0

The festive Thanksgiving weekend ended on Sunday night with an appearance at the Echo Club, out past the edge of town on Route 9, by Shorty Warren, the “Eastern King of Western Swing and his Western Rangers.” They hailed from North Jersey – he was sometimes known as the “Jersey City Cowboy” – but in their hats and their fringed pearl-snap shirts they looked like they had just ridden in from Tex Vinyard’s Oklahoma hometown.

The rug mill whistle blew at 8 every morning, echoing across town and signaling the start of another day’s work, but one Tuesday morning in October, 200 weavers on the day shift didn’t answer it. Instead of reporting to their looms, they gathered at the union hall on Center Street behind the mill for a members-only meeting.

Tempers had been rising among them for several days. The weavers were the most skilled and best-paid workers at the mill, their wages set by a piece rate negotiated in their union contract. But that rate was subject to change when the mill changed the rugs it was making, as it had on some looms recently, and the 24 weavers on those looms had walked out the day before, claiming they were each losing between $5 and $14 a week. The others stood with them now, as the mill management rejected their demand for a wage adjustment. The weavers on the evening and overnight shifts, another 200 in all, joined them, too. The union – Textile Workers Union of America, Local 26 – had 1,200 members, and by the next day the mill was silent.

Labor and management had been at odds all over the United States in recent years. As the rug mill workers were striking, so too were 500,000 American steelworkers, a month-long strike that idled the industry and still ranks among the largest in U.S. history. The Freehold strike was one of 3,606 in the nation in 1949, and one of 85 in the textile industry alone. The number of workdays lost to strikes in the U.S. in 1949 was the highest yet on record, 50.5 million, topped only by the first tumultuous year after the war, 1946.

The mill and its workers had argued often before, most heatedly in the first years after the union was organized in the early 1930s. The day after Christmas in 1935, the company locked the doors and posted a sign: “This plant will cease operations until further notice.” The union called it a lockout; the company called it a strike. During the two months of negotiations it took to open again, a soup kitchen downtown helped sustain workers and their families.

But the town and the mill had been tightly intertwined since 1904, when two Turkish-born Armenian brothers – Arshag and Miran Karagheusian, rug importers whose family had been in the business for a century – decided to start making their own rugs in the U.S. and bought a defunct shirt factory in Freehold. Just over a week before the walkout, the Foremen’s Club and the Quarter-Century Club presented the company with a plaque to be hung at the mill entrance honoring Miran Karagheusian, who had died the previous October.

“In Memoriam, Miran Karagheusian, 1875-1948

Co-founder of A.&M. Karagheusian, Inc., whose kindness and genial personality endeared him to his associates and employees”

The mill provided the kind of manufacturing jobs that have been bleeding out of the U.S. economy for the last 40 years. In 1949, about 30 percent of the non-farm jobs in the U.S. were in manufacturing; today it’s less than 9 percent.

Bruce’s father, Douglas, got a job in the mill when he quit high school after his freshman year in 1941, working as a creeler – the first tedious step on the path to weaver, tying yarn into the bobbin frames so the looms could run without interruption – but he left two years later for the Army. When he came back from the war, he didn’t go back to the mill. But many other workers stayed much longer. My grandfather worked there for 31 years, until it closed. My uncle followed his own father and brother into the mill, where they all worked for decades; he met my aunt when she was working there, too, and supported her and their four children on what he earned there. News had just reached town about a retired weaver with a similarly long tenure:

“Mr. Draper went to England to see how he liked it and he found conditions so favorable there that he decided to stay,” said his landlady on Jackson Street, just a few doors down from the mill itself, who reported that he was now living with his niece in Birmingham. It was his tenth visit to his home country; he was last there in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Alfred Draper had apprenticed to the weaving trade at the age of 8 in Kidderminster, England, the seat of the British carpet industry. The looms the Karagheusian brothers brought to Freehold in 1904 came from Kidderminster, and many weavers came with them. The broadloom department – the biggest looms and the best-paying jobs – was long known as the “House of Lords,” dominated by British-born weavers who held tight to their looms and passed them to their sons. My grandfather, who ran the shearing machine that was the last stop for the rugs before they were rolled and shipped, believed he never got a loom of his own because he was an immigrant from Slovakia who spoke with an accent.

As the striking workers stayed out on Wednesday, the company said it would not arbitrate the pay rate dispute until they returned. The industrial relations director called the strike “illegal,” and sent a telegram to the union’s national president, Emil Rieve, asking him to step in and call it off. On Wednesday afternoon, workers jammed the union hall to hear a local official read Rieve’s telegram in response:

“Understand work stoppage has occurred at Freehold plant of A.&M. Karagheusian, inc. Immediately advise on my behalf all employees that such stoppage is expressly repudiated and direct them to return to work and to cease such stoppage.”

They voted to return to work when the whistle blew on Thursday morning at 8, but they weren’t happy:

On the following Thursday evening, a week after the mill clattered back to life, 75 managers held a banquet at the Lithuanian Club to send off one of their own:

Born in Kidderminster, George Hill followed his father into the carpet trade there, and the followed him again into the mill here. He had lately been in charge of the burling department, where the workers, women mostly, snipped loose knots and threads after the rugs came out of the looms. Unlike Alf Draper, he wasn’t retiring back to England; he had a daughter and two grandchildren in Fort Lauderdale and was moving there.

To mark the end of a contentious week, the company placed an ad in the Transcript that made no mention of the strike but reminded the town how dependent it was on the mill’s paychecks: 39 percent of Freehold’s families, it said, earned “all or part of their livelihood from A.&M. Karagheusian, Inc.”

On the same day that the mill fight reached its peak – the day of the union hall vote in the wake of the dueling telegrams – some Freehold High School students were at the United Nations, watching as the world’s leaders were trying to learn how not to fight.

While its familiar home was under construction in Manhattan, the U.N. was meeting in a Sperry Gyroscope Corporation building in Lake Success, Long Island. The 78 seniors in the high school’s history classes rode buses there, where they attended meetings of the human rights committee, the budget committee and the political action committee, as well as a discussion about “trusteeship in the Italian colonies.”

Priscilla Joffee said the visit left her with “the ray of hope that with the effort of the United Nations peace will last forever.” A Transcript editorial was similarly hopeful:

He didn’t have a name when he was first introduced to the town: “Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Springsteen, 87 Randolph street, are parents of a son born last Friday at Monmouth Memorial hospital, Long Branch.”

His was among six births reported in the Transcript that week – all boys, no wonder the town Little League had to add two teams 12 years later – and 3.6 million in the nation in year four of the postwar baby boom.

Bruce’s birth announcement appeared in “News of Your Town and Your Neighbors,” a column that filled at least half of one of the paper’s broadsheet pages each week with the kind of news that is now confined mostly to social media. Now, you learn about the people you already know; then, you learned about everybody. Bracketing the news about the new baby on Randolph Street was the news that Mrs. Letcy Jones – wife of the longtime pastor of Second Baptist Church, an anchor of the predominantly Black neighborhood on the west edge of town – attended her nephew’s funeral in New York; and that Patty King – whose father owned the Oldsmobile and Cadillac dealership across the street from the firehouse on Main Street – was a junior at Maryland College for Women, “majoring in kindergarten teaching.”

The 1950 models had arrived at the small car dealers around town: Packards on Mechanic Street; Hudsons on Throckmorton; Dodges on Center; Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs on Main; Studebakers, Fords and Chevrolets out on Highway 9.

The first baby boomers hadn’t hit kindergarten yet, but the schools were already starting to feel squeezed, and nervously eyeing the years ahead.

The war – the deadliest that humans had ever inflicted on each other, erasing 60 million lives from Earth – was just four years past, and two more refugees from it had arrived in town. They had traveled to New York from the port of Bremerhaven, Germany, with 1,166 other refugees on a U.S. Army transport ship, the General McRae.

Tens of millions of Europeans had been uprooted by the war, and those who were unable or unwilling to return to their homes – the DP’s, Displaced Persons – languished in resettlement camps until they could be placed in new ones.

“Under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the IRO” – the International Refugee Organization of the United Nations – “is authorized to bring to this country 205,000 refugees before June 30, 1950, if it has the necessary assurances that they will not become public charges. The IRO still announced today that it still has more than 600,000 Europeans in DP camps awaiting resettlement and that it has sent out a call for new sponsors.”

The local veterans of the war sometimes felt a little displaced themselves. Like many other veterans with new babies, Douglas Springsteen was squeezed into his parents’ house with his young family, next door to the convent and church of the St. Rose of Lima Catholic parish. The Depression and the war had stalled new home construction, and builders were just starting to catch up to the huge wave of postwar demand. A street of identical new bungalows was going up on the southern edge of town – just four rooms each, but with a “full expansion attic” that could turn into another bedroom or two when the next babies arrived. The G.I. Bill signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt five years earlier – just two weeks after the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy – offered a federal loan guaranty that made it easier for veterans to buy homes. Veterans buying one of the Barkalow Homes had to put no cash down.

Polio, the disease that withered Roosevelt’s legs, had surged in the county over the hot, humid summer, about eight new cases each day in July – a higher rate than any other New Jersey county, more than double the previous year – but as the weather cooled, the daily average dropped to one.

“Infantile paralysis has thrust itself upon our people throughout our nation with great violence. It is about to exceed the 1916 record year and is bringing tragedy into the lives of thousands of helpless boys. girls, men and women,” said the chairman of the county chapter of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, a nonprofit founded by Roosevelt and better known as the March of Dimes.

One of the new cases was William Franklin, whose grandmother baked a cake for his 19^th birthday, which he celebrated in Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, the hospital where Bruce was born.

“He can now move his right leg, and he walked Sunday, with the help of nurses, to the window.”

“False rumors that the young man would have to burn his clothes because of the disease started two benefits around the neighborhood where he resides. Last week Wednesday and Thursday a group of youngsters with whom he played raised about $13 to defray the cost of a new outfit. It has since been decided to make him a present of the money when he returns home.”

“Up to the town’s very doorstep spread the fields and woodlands of the gently rolling land of Monmouth County, the second richest agricultural county in the United States.”

The WPA Guide to New Jersey (1939)

Every summer those fields filled with migrant workers – African-Americans from the South mostly, but lately some Puerto Ricans, too – who followed the harvest north through the farms and orchards of the Eastern states. They lived mostly in clusters of small shacks on the farms that surrounded the town in every direction. Fred Springsteen – “master of the art of electricity,” as his grandson, Bruce, described him in an early unreleased song, “Randolph Street” – traveled out to the migrant camps to fix the workers’ radios.

The town alternated between paternalism and disdain for this annual influx. The Freehold Migrant Family Center had just ended its third season of providing health and social services for migrant workers and classes for their children, a joint project of the New Jersey Department of Labor and a local committee led by the Rev. Bernard Garlick, pastor of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Its home was in the Court Street School, which until just two years earlier, when the new state Constitution outlawed segregation, was the elementary school for the town’s Black children. “Freehold is gaining national recognition for its pioneering work with the Family Center,” Father Garlick told the Transcript.

The Transcript applauded the Migrant Family Center in an editorial, but slighted the migrants themselves:

“It is a step in the right direction because, without instruction in matters of health and social matters, the marginal citizen will remain a marginal citizen and a drain upon the taxpayers and a burden to police,” it wrote. “The migrants have been looked upon as a necessary evil and in many cases have done little to ingratiate themselves to the communities they visit.”

A Saturday night visit to town by one migrant had just ended badly:

The 31-year-old farm worker from Florida, accused of stealing a car, was captured by Patrolman Henry Lefkowich after a foot chase on Main Street. Lefkowich was leading him to the jail next to the courthouse in the middle of town when:

Lefkowich caught up with him at McChesney’s icehouse “and they had a tussle there. Lefkowich made him release the gun but it fell in the bushes. Lefkowich couldn’t find the gun.” The chase continued, through backyards, over fences, until the suspect disappeared into the woods at the edge of town. The state police were called in for the search. About two hours later, at 10 p.m., the suspect was arrested near the farm where he worked, about two miles outside town on Robertsville Road.

Construction had started two years earlier on the Garden State Parkway, the road that would ultimately run 172 miles from the New York state border in the north to the tip of Cape May in the south and forever alter the state’s landscape and character.

Maybe at first – especially all the truck farms and orchards that grew the vegetables and fruits sold in New York City and Philadelphia. But as the new highway cut through the county’s farmland it would open so much new territory to development that later generations would wonder how it acquired its bucolic name.

Two seasons important to the life of the town ended in September:

The annual harness meet at Freehold Raceway, where horses had been racing since before the Civil War, and the baseball season of the town team in the Jersey Shore Baseball League, which drew hundreds of people every Sunday afternoon to Lincoln Field, a block from Bruce’s home. In the next to last game of the season, the Gulistans – named for the premier rug brand woven at the mill on Jackson Street, and led by Bruce’s cousin Dave “Dim” Cashion – were still hoping to make the league playoffs.

In that blowout “Cashion’s fast ball was whizzing past the A.C. stickmen as he marked up seven strikeouts and passed only four.” The next Sunday he hit a home run over the left field fence, but it wasn’t enough:

Crowds came to watch the games at Lincoln Field because they couldn’t watch major league games on television yet. TV was in its infancy, programming was limited, and sets were expensive.

That was a big-ticket item at a time when the median family income in the United States was $3,100. Which is why people went to the movies at the two theaters on Main Street – so often that the theaters changed the movies every other day. The Liberty, the second-run theater, aimed its Wednesday nights at a Black audience, including vaudeville acts “direct from Harlem.”

On the day Bruce was born, Virginia Mayo was on screen in both theaters. At the Strand, next door to the courthouse, she was being pursued by Ronald Reagan in “The Girl from Jones Beach.”

At the Liberty, down by the train station, she was the wife of the killer played by Jimmy Cagney. “Made it, Ma!” Cagney shouts from the top of the gas tank where police have surrounded him in the movie’s indelible fiery climax. “Top of the World!”

I’ve spent a lot of time with old newspapers. Long before they were digitized, I paged through dusty volumes of yellowing back issues and scrolled through cloudy reels of microfilm, straining my eyes until I finally needed bifocals. Not surprising for someone who serves as the town historian, except that I started doing it long before I became the town historian. I started doing it after I heard “My Hometown” when it came out in 1984, and I do it still.

I do it because that song sparked a question I’ve been chasing ever since: How did his town – my town – become that town? How did Bruce make our hometown seem to so many other people like their hometown? Half the answer will always elude me, because I’m not a musician, and I can’t parse the many sounds he alchemized into his sound. But the other half, the stories – those I knew.

I knew the stories first because of birth and geography. Like Bruce, I grew up amid a large, sprawling clan of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who hadn’t moved more than a few blocks across several generations, and whose lives, in concert with the lives of all their neighbors and friends, classmates and workmates, comprised an ordinary, epic, American saga. But I wanted to know more.

And so, the newspapers. The Freehold Transcript, like most local newspapers in the predigital era, chronicled the town’s life so thoroughly that I can know more about what happened here 75 years ago than I can about what happened last week. The news was not just what the town government decided, or who the police arrested, or how many touchdowns the high school football team scored. It was who was born and who died; who married whom and who the bridesmaids were; who made the dean’s list at Rutgers and who got promoted to dyehouse foreman at the rug mill. It was like a compendium of everybody’s social media feeds, without the partisan rancor.

It was also a ground-level view of American history. I read those old papers with two eyes – one local, one national. Those of you who landed here because you are from Freehold will recognize names and places and events. But this is aimed at a broader audience, too – readers with no ties to Freehold other than their interest in understanding the roots of Bruce’s work, and in seeing how his hometown embodies his country.

In the posts in this section I’ll explore some local news from the past and look at it through a national lens, starting with the month Bruce was born, September 1949, and advancing through his years here as these stories unfolded around him. I’ll also occasionally reach back and jump ahead to look at other local stories that have something to say about what’s happening now.

There’s much to learn here, visiting the world that shaped his life, and that in turn shaped the world he built in his work. “The past is never dead,” said William Faulkner, who, like Bruce, harvested stories from what he called his “own little postage stamp of native soil” in Mississippi. “It’s not even past.”

“Without drawing too heavily on its storied past, Freehold has individuality produced by a fusion of rural, urban, and residential life. In an unobtrusive way it seems to embody America’s growth from farm to factory.”

WPA Guide to New Jersey (1939)