GOIN’ HOME“We gotta get out while we’re young,” Bruce sang in “Born to Run,” and he lived up tothose words.

By his early 20s, he had followed the example of his parents and left Freehold. Hegravitated to the Jersey Shore area, especially Asbury Park, where he became part of a musicalcommunity and laid the foundation for his future success.But what happens after you leave? Do you keep running and wear yourself out? Do youreturn in desperation because you can’t run another step? Or do you go back on your own termsafter a successful race? Bruce ultimately chose the latter course.On the Born in the U.S.A. tour, he introduced “My Hometown” by telling audiencesabout how he would come off the road, get in his car and drive to Freehold. “I got to realizingthat the place that you’re born and raised in always stays in your blood, that no matter what you become or where you go, it never, ever leaves you. And that you belong someplace,”he said at aJuly 4, 1985, concert in London.

Starting a family provided an incentive to strengthen his ties. “There’s something aboutholding your kid’s hand on a street where you held your father’s hand that’s very resonant,” hetold Ed Bradley during a 1996 interview for CBS Television’s “60 Minutes” newsmagazine. Hesaid he wanted his children “to know where they came from -- what and who came before them,what they went through -- a sense of some sort of history of who they are.”

Bruce made his presence felt through his music as well. “It is the particularity of hissongs, the portrait they offer of the real life of a real place, that makes people in New Jersey --more especially at the Shore in general, and most especially of all in Freehold -- so proprietaryabout him,” Coyne, the local historian, wrote in comparing him to Faulkner.