Bruce Springsteen Almost Didn't Happen

Springsteen Father Hit By Car When Little

Sunset Pavilion, Asbury Park.

It turns out that somebody forgot to childproof the streets of Freehold, N.J., where the Springsteen family was living when Bruce's father, Douglas, was a child. Those new-fangled horseless carriages were just about everywhere, and people were still wrestling with the idea that cars and trucks didn't behave at all like a horse pulling a carriage or a wagon.

Anyway, Douglas, nine years old at the time, was on the way to the movies with his grandmother on a Friday evening in September 1933 "when he ran into the side of a car" and was knocked down, according to a report in a local newspaper. A researcher looking into the history of Freehold found the story in the Freehold Transcript, and the Asbury Park Press shared the news with the world on Bruce Springsteen's birthday in 2018. (For the APP story, click here.)

Fortunately, Douglas was not seriously injured. He was taken to a doctor, who determined that the boy "had suffered nothing more than a bump on his head and a severe shaking up."

His older sister had not been so lucky. In 1927, when Bruce's Aunt Virginia was five years old, she was riding her tricycle when a truck backing out of a gas station ran over her and killed her.

It seems fair to say that the Springsteen family never recovered from this little girl's death. Bruce Springsteen tells the story on pages 5 and 6 of his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run.

As a teenager, Bruce Springsteen had his own brush with vehicular death. This also happened in Freehold. "In 1967, I would crush my leg and suffer a concussion after being T-boned on my small Yamaha motorcycle by a '63 Caddy on my way home up South Street. The bike crunched and slid under the car's front end. I went sailing (no helmet law, no helmet) twenty feet into the air, landing on the hard-ass blacktop on the corner of Institute and South Street. I was knocked out cold for thirty minutes, all the way from Freehold to the hospital in Neptune." (Born to Run, p. 86.)

The good news is that the concussion got him out of the draft. The draft board in Newark classified him 4F (pp. 101-102).

See also Springsteen's Bill of Rights.