Hometown Stars and Fireworks over the Ocean
Near Asbury Park, New Jersey
This little stretch of the Jersey Shore has an outsized claim on Hollywood. Two future stars were born within seven years and a few miles of each other, right around Asbury Park. Danny DeVito was born in Neptune Township, next door, in nineteen forty-four, and grew up in the Asbury Park area, where he began acting in school.
Jack Nicholson was born in Neptune City in nineteen thirty-seven, grew up nearby in Spring Lake, and was voted class clown at Manasquan High School before he ever set foot on a soundstage. And the town they came from has always known how to throw a party, never more so than on the Fourth of July. Independence Day at the shore means fireworks bursting over the Atlantic, launched from the beaches at dusk and drawing crowds from across the tri-state region, a long-running tradition.
It is a bittersweet date in this town, because the unrest of nineteen seventy also began on a Fourth of July. But today the holiday is pure celebration again, the boardwalk packed, the sky on fire above the water that James Bradley bought a hundred and fifty years ago.
