Jersey Shore Magazine

J e r s e y s h o r e • F A L L / H O L I D A Y 2 0 1 9 10 10 Springsteen: His Hometown BEACHCOMBER Frank Stefanko The new, great exhibit at the Monmouth County Historical Association in Freehold " L e t u s t ak e a j o u r n e y do w n t h e S h ore t o s ee w h a t w e c a n f i n d… " Bruce Springsteen, 1978 O ne word. Bruce. Every Jersey Shore local and visitor knows exactly who that is. It's not Bruce the accountant, or Bruce the guy down the street, or even Bruce the Shark. It's Bruce Springsteen, the Jersey Shore's most legendary music icon. The Springsteen: His Hometown exhibit at the Monmouth County Historical Association (MCHA) cel- ebrates the life and story of The Boss right in his hometown of Freehold. The exhibit officially opened on September 28 and runs through late Fall. According to a release announcing the show, the exhibit provides a com- prehensive look at how Monmouth County has been thematically woven into Bruce Springsteen's music and art throughout his career. "Our whole museum will be filled with more than 150 items and artifacts from Bruce Springsteen's entire career, from his early days with The Castiles through his most recent 2019 release of Western Stars," said Meg Sharp Walton, Executive Director of the MCHA. "There's going to be many pieces that the pub- lic has never seen before, including a scrapbook of Springsteen's career kept by his mother, Adele." As Springsteen is the Jersey Shore's first son, the shore is prominent- ly woven throughout the exhibit. "This is a Monmouth County story with songs about places everybody knows about. The world meets the Jersey Shore through the words of Springsteen, and people in Sweden and Spain sing about our Route 9 when they sing along with him," Sharp Walton said. The Springsteen: His Hometown exhibit is presented by the MCHA in cooperation with the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University and the History and Anthropology department at Monmouth University. Exhibit cura- tors are Melissa Ziobro, Monmouth University specialist professor of public history, and Bernadette Rogoff, director of collections for the MCHA. Eileen Chapman, director of the Springsteen Archives, and Robert Santelli, founding director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, are exhibit advisors. The idea for the exhibit stemmed from one of Ziobro's Museums and Archives classes at Monmouth University, which became home to the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music in 2017 after housing the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection since 2011. "My class started with a small exhibition at the university library as they put what they learned about curating into play. My students wanted to put the exhibit in a more visible loca- tion, so I approached the Monmouth County Historical Association to see if they were interested, and they said yes," Ziobro explained.

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