Bruce (68 page)

After a while, he picked up the ball and started tossing it up into the air, catching it and throwing it a little higher, then a little higher than that. “Then he said, ‘I can throw this ball up into the sky so far it will never come down,’” Pam says. “I said, ‘
Do it! Do it!
’”

Bruce stood up, planted his feet in the grass, took a deep breath, and tilted his head to gaze toward the fluffy clouds drifting across the blue. He took another deep breath, reared back until the knuckles of his throwing hand nearly touched the grass, and then, with a mighty heave, sent the
ball skyward. “It goes up and up and up,” Pam says. “I’m looking and looking.” It kept climbing. From where Pam was sitting, and then standing, the white ball grew smaller and smaller. “I saw it going up, and I waited and waited.” Bruce watched with her for a little while, then went back into the kitchen, leaving Pam to stand alone, eyes wide and searching the depths of the clear blue sky. She has no explanation for what Bruce did; whether he’d performed some kind of trick, conducted real magic, or somehow found the power to hurl an ordinary baseball into the outer reaches of the earth’s atmosphere. All she knows for sure is what she saw. Or, more accurately, what she didn’t see.

The ball never came down.

Mesmerized by the music on Fred and Alice’s living room radio, circa 1952.
Courtesy of Cashion Family Archive

Anthony and Adelina Zerilli, Bruce’s grandparents on his mother’s side, on their wedding day.
Courtesy of Springsteen Family Archive

Douglas Springsteen at work in Freehold’s M&Q factory, spring 1964.
© George J. Evans Photography

Bruce and Ginny Springsteen dancing in the Randolph Street house, circa 1953 . . . 
Courtesy of Cashion Family Archive

. . . and dancing some more at a family gathering in the late ’00s.
Courtesy of Cashion Family Archive

Bruce and Ginny on the Jersey Shore, circa 1955.
Courtesy of Springsteen Family Archive

The extended Springsteen clan gathers in 1961 to celebrate the christening of Bruce’s cousin Grant. Bruce stretches out to the left; Alice and Fred Springsteen sit on the far left; Dave “Dim” Cashion is to Fred’s right; and Doug and Adele Springsteen are in the back row, second and third from the right.
Courtesy of Cashion Family Archive

Bruce at thirteen, showing off for the camera.
Courtesy of Springsteen Family Archive

The Castiles in 1966—high school kids already more than a year into their careers. Left to right: George Theiss, Bruce, Frank Marziotti, Paul Popkin, Vinnie Maniello.
Courtesy of Billy Smith Collection

Standing proud during their first stand at Greenwich Village’s famous Cafe Wha. Left to right: Bruce, George Theiss, Curt Fluhr, Paul Popkin, Vinnie Maniello.
Courtesy of Billy Smith Collection

Child in the early months of 1969, just after their union at the Upstage club and a few months before they had to change their name to Steel Mill
(left to right):
Danny Federici, Vinnie Roslin, Bruce, Vini Lopez.
Courtesy of Billy Smith
Collection