Electric Boat

Electric Boat is the submarine shipyard that gives the Birdsey family its livelihood and helps define the economic history of eastern Connecticut. Its work links local employment to national defense, but the relationship is not abstract: the shift schedule determines the household’s rhythms, the shipyard’s wages shape arguments about the twins’ future, and its eventual layoffs threaten workers who have spent most of their lives there. The yard’s rise and decline frame a shift from military manufacturing to casino-led development.

Setting and industrial role

Electric Boat is located in Groton, Connecticut, where it builds submarines and works in partnership with the Navy. In the 1950s, that partnership placed the shipyard at the center of the region’s Cold War economy. The Nautilus, America’s first nuclear-powered submarine, represented the national effort to contain Communism; Electric Boat’s workers built the vessel that embodied that purpose. The Birdsey family attended the launch because Ray’s job as a pipe fitter made them ticket-holding guests at the ceremony. The event joined family memory to industrial history: the twins stood in the crowd with their mother, and the launch later remained part of the family’s remembered past.

The shipyard’s production continued across generations and changing political circumstances. Ray had gone to war in Korea to oppose Communism, then spent nearly forty years building nuclear submarines in case the Russians launched an attack. When asked what that history meant to him, he described it as politics and his own part in it as going to work every day and doing the job. His account gives Electric Boat two scales at once: it is an instrument of military policy, and it is a workplace whose meaning for a laborer is measured in shifts, wages, and years of service.

Ray’s work and the household rhythm

Ray worked the third shift at Electric Boat, building submarines at night. On weekdays he slept in the spare room, rising to his alarm at three-thirty in the afternoon. During the day, the boys tiptoed and whispered around the sleeping adult; at nine-thirty in the evening, when Ray’s coworker Eddie Banas arrived and honked, they felt free to move and play. They celebrated the truck door slamming by jumping on their mattresses in the dark. The shipyard’s schedule thus extended into domestic life: the children’s sense of freedom was timed to the beginning of Ray’s work night.

The connection also persisted through family illness. During Ma’s chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Yale–New Haven Hospital, Ray drove her there, kept her company, ate in the cafeteria, and rested in a chair beside her bed. By early evening he would begin the drive north on I-95 so he could make his shift at Electric Boat. When Dominick suggested he might be taking on too much, Ray treated his obligations as self-evident: he had to do what else there was to do. His routine presents care and employment not as separate parts of his life but as duties he carried from the hospital back to the shipyard.

Work, education, and gender

Electric Boat’s economic importance shaped Ray’s ideas about what the twins should do after high school. He opposed paying for their college educations, citing the cost, his own responsibility for the household finances, and his suspicion that colleges were politically radical and rife with drugs. He argued instead that two able-bodied young men could work, enter the Navy, or take shipyard jobs as apprentice pipe fitters, electricians, or welders. Some of those jobs, he pointed out, carried draft deferments; submarine construction also put food on the table and supported the war effort. His preference for shipyard work made the family’s dependence on Electric Boat part of a larger conflict over education, military service, and the twins’ independence.

The shipyard’s employment history was changing in another way. After Electric Boat began hiring women to work in the yard, Dessa and a friend organized day care for women welders and pressed management to put an on-the-job harassment policy in writing. The initiative addressed practical barriers to women’s employment as well as their treatment by male coworkers. Dessa’s work made Electric Boat a setting for labor organizing and workplace change, not only submarine production; it also connected her public activity to Dominick’s later memories of their marriage.

The family’s relation to the company was not limited to Ray’s permanent work. After their first year at college, Dominick and Thomas returned home in 1969 and took seasonal jobs with the Three Rivers Public Works Department. The work was difficult and low-paid, but it provided paychecks and got them out of the house while Ray was home sleeping. Their employment was with the town rather than the shipyard, yet Electric Boat remained the background against which work was understood: Ray’s industrial schedule shaped their days, while their own temporary labor offered a different kind of routine and a measure of distance from home.

Layoffs and insecurity

By the later Cold War years, Electric Boat’s continued operation no longer guaranteed security. A purchasing agent described the strain of not knowing whether the next round of layoffs would cost him his job, an uncertainty he associated with developing an ulcer. He considered whether he might find work at the casino planned by the Wequonnoc Nation, perhaps in purchasing or in an entirely different role. His possible move from shipyard procurement to casino work makes the economic transition personal: the question was not simply what industry would prosper, but how a worker could keep earning a living when the future of the yard was uncertain.

Ray eventually faced that insecurity himself. After almost forty years at Electric Boat, beginning around 1952 or 1953, he was laid off just before his pension reached its maximum. The company kept suggesting that older workers might be recalled, but they were not. Ray had given the shipyard nearly his entire working life; the threat to his retirement showed how little that investment protected him when corporate decisions changed. He described older employees as the ones being sent to the slaughterhouse, while Dominick tried to reassure him that the yard could not manage without him. The exchange reveals both Ray’s fear of being discarded and the limits of the family’s ability to comfort him.

The layoffs affected other characters’ calculations as well. Leo worried that cancellation of the Seawolf submarine contracts could lead to substantial job losses and looked to the casino as a possible source of thousands of new positions. Dominick countered that the Persian Gulf crisis might prompt increased submarine production. Their disagreement sets two economic futures against each other: continued defense spending could sustain Electric Boat, while a downturn could accelerate the search for work in a new industry.

Regional transformation and narrative significance

In the post–Cold War era, Electric Boat’s payroll shrank to a small fraction of its former size. The once-busy yard became known as the ghost yard, a sharp contrast with the around-the-clock production Dominick had seen on the Gold Star Bridge. Even as the Cold War receded, submarines remained part of the region’s industrial identity; Dominick recalls the sequence of vessels built there and the long relationship between war and Connecticut. The yard’s emptying is therefore both an economic change and the fading of a local world that had organized work and family life for decades.

The replacement economy appears in the expansion of Wequonnoc Moon Casino. Opened in September 1992, the complex far exceeded optimistic expectations for regional revival. It expanded continuously, rose among the woods off Route 22, and eventually employed seventy-five thousand people, drawing cars and buses at all hours. The contrast is not a simple story of prosperity replacing decline: the shipyard’s defense contracts and the casino’s growth represent different sources of regional employment, each tied to institutions larger than the individual workers who depend on them. The old hospital grounds, once part of the sacred hunting and fishing lands of the Wequonnoc Nation, were also under discussion for return to the tribe, making the region’s changing economic landscape inseparable from its contested history of land.

Electric Boat’s narrative function comes from the way its industrial history enters ordinary life. The shipyard provides Ray’s income, keeps him away from the family by day, and brings him back to work after caring for Ma. It supplies the terms of his argument with the twins about college and military service, creates employment risks that reach beyond his own household, and ultimately becomes a diminished presence beside the casino economy. Its trajectory turns the Birdseys’ private memories into a record of local labor: from the proud public spectacle of the Nautilus launch to the later image of the ghost yard, the place that once promised work and purpose also demonstrates how precarious a lifetime of work can be.