A photo of Bruce Springsteen’s youngest son in a dress uniform is circulating again this week, framed as fresh news. It is not. Sam Springsteen took the oath as a Jersey City firefighter on Tuesday, January 14, 2020, at a 10 a.m. ceremony inside City Hall, one of 15 recruits sworn in by Mayor Steven Fulop. What the recycled posts leave out is how long the road to that morning was.
Asked by reporters afterward, the rock star stepped aside. “This is my son’s day, so I’m staying out of it,” he said, before adding that Sam “was very dedicated for quite a few years.” Sam, then 26, kept it shorter still: “I don’t have too much to say.” Pressed on whether the job had been hard to get, he allowed that “It wasn’t easy.”
Six years from fire academy to city oath
The public record supports the father’s point about patience. Pieced together from what the family and the city said at the time, the route looks like this:
- January 5, 1994: Samuel Ryan Springsteen is born, the third child of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa, after Evan (1990) and Jessica (1991).
- 2014: He graduates from the Monmouth County Fire Academy, then serves as a volunteer at three different firehouses.
- 2017: He takes the civil service exam.
- Before the oath: Five months of Jersey City academy training, followed by a three-month emergency medical technician course; the whole class finished fully EMT-certified.
- January 14, 2020: Sworn in with the department’s tenth recruit class since 2013.
Counting from the county academy diploma to the oath gives six years, and the exam alone sat almost three years before the city called his number.
Why a paid city job takes so long
A volunteer certificate did not lead straight to a paycheck. Sam’s path ran through a county academy, unpaid shifts, a civil service exam and then the city’s own academy and medical training, four separate hurdles before the badge. Jersey City sits across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and its department is busy. Fulop said in the city’s announcement that crews respond to 1,300 fires a year. The city had hired 204 firefighters since 2013, which brought the uniformed ranks to 666, a level officials called historic after years when, they said, an average of four firehouses sat idle each shift for lack of staff.
That context matters for the old headline’s tidy arc, “rock legend’s kid follows a different dream.” Sam joined the department through a system built to ignore surnames.
A family that stayed out of show business
None of the three Springsteen-Scialfa children went into music. Springsteen and Scialfa, who joined the E Street Band in 1984 and married him in 1991, moved the family from Los Angeles back to New Jersey in the early 1990s, partly to raise them away from photographers. Their daughter Jessica turned a childhood on the family’s horse farm in Colts Neck into a show-jumping career and rode for the United States at the Tokyo Olympics, where the US team took silver in team jumping on August 7, 2021.
Sam has given almost no interviews since the swearing-in, and the family has not publicly announced any change in his job. The viral posts this week add no new detail beyond the 2020 ceremony.
The last word from that January morning belonged to his father, who was asked whether he worried about the risks of the work. His answer was four words long: “Sam can handle himself.”
Further reading
- City of Jersey City: Mayor Fulop swears in 15 new firefighters (January 2020)
- Wikipedia: Patti Scialfa
- Wikipedia: Jessica Springsteen
Image: Red0ctober22, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
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