Read More: Back to Bio The following is excerpted from article written by Jim Fusilli and published in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, May 18, 1998, three days after Mr. Sinatra's death. If you were an Italian-American who grew up in the '50s in Frank Sinatra's hometown of Hoboken, N.J., he was virtually a member of your family, a presence second only to your parents and, perhaps, an older sibling or resident grandparent. His legend dominated conversations, his achievements were as familiar as if they'd been inscribed on walls; his music was everywhere, in its original form on vinyl or wafting from radios or tumbling out of the mouths of anybody with the nerve to sing aloud. An appearance by Sinatra on TV brought all else to an abrupt halt. Had Nielsen included the 50,000 or so residents of Hoboken in their tallies, the numbers would have been so badly skewed as to suggest fraud. To say he was a god is to understate his stature in Hoboken. He was the god. By the time I was six years old, I could name the address of the house where Sinatra grew up (415 Monroe), tell you the names of his domineering mother and placid father (Dolly and Marty), and I knew he'd won a contest on Major Bowe's Original Amateur Hour, though I had no idea who Major Bowes was. I also assumed, from the moment I knew what the expression meant, that he was mobbed up, since everybody told me was, and a short while later, I learned to love the oft-repeated but never verified tale that had Tommy Dorsey under threat to have his brains splattered across a contract if he'd refused to sign it and give Sinatra his freedom. Such stories were told with a wink that insinuated first-hand information. Everyone I knew in our mile-square town on the Hudson claimed to have known him and, thus, told stories with the kind of detail that gives a tale the ring of truth. "I seen him once at the Blue Point and he says to this dame…" Or "Me and my brother Jidge was over by Leo's." I knew the Blue Point; we went to Leo's Grandevous for pizza. I went to elementary school with Sinatra's godfather's grandson, whose father ran with my Uncle Eddie, the toughest guy in town. When Unk told me a Sinatra story, no matter how incoherent or implausible, I accepted that it had to be real. To those of us who were too young to have actually met him, he had an additional appeal that may have been lost on our parents. To us, he was a guy from the neighborhood who had done very, very well. He was a guy who'd got out. It wasn't until I grew older and moved away that I began to understand the size of his talent, when I began to understand what it takes to excel. His gift was, of course, profound, but he understood what he needed to do transcend being merely gifted and become great. He knew what he wanted, he went after it and he got it. Nobody gave him nothing and he got it anyway - in a town like Hoboken, so accurately depicted in Elia Kazan's film "On the Waterfront," that was how we described a man. As a teenager, my father, a singer of some minor acclaim, took my mother to see Sinatra at the Paramount across the river in Manhattan. I'm sure he imagined himself in that spotlight, downstage from Benny Goodman, his small, olive-hued hands clutching the microphone stand as he crooned impossibly romantic ballads with impeccable pitch and diction to swooning bobby-soxers. In that dream state, it was he who would whisper, in a flawless baritone, that simple double entrendre: "If you let me love you, it's for sure I'm gonna love you all the way." And my mother, who was then his Irish sweetheart, would swoon and she would moan "Jimmy" and not "Frankie" like the other bobby-soxers. I may be wrong, but I don't believe my father bought into the ring-a-ding-ding, booze-and-broads routine that defined Sinatra for a while. For this, I was glad: "Ocean's 11," the Rat Pack and all that stuff made my skin crawl; and it makes me shudder now to think of him taunting Sammy Davis Jr. or sizing up Juliet Prowse as if she were prime rib. But many men in our neighborhood loved that Sinatra, loved the idea of a man not unlike them, at least at some point, now doing whatever the hell he wanted to. These hard, callous guys who worked the waterfront piers or walked a beat under the viaduct, they considered Sinatra a peer. And they weren't wrong: When I saw Sinatra in movies, particularly when he played a guy with a background not unlike his own - Maggio in "From Here to Eternity" is the best example - I saw the link between them and their former classmate. In a certain light, they looked alike, had similar gestures and they pronounced certain words as he did. (But only when he spoke - Sinatra talked Hoboken, but he rarely sang Hoboken. As a vocalist, his diction was as impeccable as his phrasing.) My father finally did get to meet his idol. After his job at the factory dried up, he ran for local office, won and eventually earned a statewide position that, at one point, required him to present a plaque for something or other to Sinatra. My mother and he traveled to Atlantic City, where Sinatra was performing, to execute the duties. Sinatra, my mother told me, was charming if efficient during the dressing-room ceremony. A photographer snapped a color shot of the three of them. My parents are beaming and there is an unmistakable resemblance between the two aging, robust Italian-American men, their gray hair thinning above rubbery jowls. After the photographer snapped the shot of the three of them, he asked Sinatra if he could take one of the singer alone for a keepsake. "No," Sinatra barked, and turned his back. Reprinted with permission