Three Rivers Public Works Department

The Three Rivers Public Works Department is the municipal employer that hires Dominick Birdsey and Thomas Birdsey for seasonal work in the summer of 1969. The job gives the twins paychecks and a daily routine beyond home, but its crews also expose them to the physical demands and unequal conditions of local public labor. In the wider story, the department’s work sits between Ray’s preferred alternatives of military service or shipyard employment and the later economic shift from submarine manufacturing toward casino development.

Seasonal Work in 1969

Jobs were scarce when the twins returned home after their first year of college, but they found seasonal positions with the department. Their stepfather, Ray, knew the superintendent, Lou Clukey, through the VFW, a connection that helped open the opportunity. The work was minimum-wage labor with fringe benefits that included poison ivy and heat rash; for Dominick, its value also lay in earning money and spending the day outdoors after a year of books and confinement in a dorm room with his brother.

The department’s city barn served as the morning dispatch point. At seven-thirty each workday, the crews reported there, and Lou Clukey assigned them to jobs around Three Rivers. This routine gives the public works operation a concrete, local structure: a superintendent dispatches municipal crews from the city barn, while seasonal workers carry out varied maintenance tasks across town.

Crew and Working Conditions

Dominick and Thomas were assigned to a crew led by Dell Weeks, a burly foreman with a shaved head and a silver front tooth. The crew’s work included shoveling sand, cutting swamp brush, pumping sewage, and disinfecting campground toilets in the morning; mowing was saved for the afternoon. The jobs were physically unpleasant, and the account associates the crew’s assignment to the day’s dirtiest tasks with the conspicuous tension between Dell and Lou, a former Navy officer whom Dell disliked and who did not appear to return the feeling.

Alongside Dell, the crew had four workers: Dominick, Thomas, Leo Blood, and Ralph Drinkwater. Ralph was small but muscular, cocky, and steady at work. He wore the same black jeans and blue tank top throughout the summer and listened to a transistor radio clipped to his belt, its Top 40 music and baseball broadcasts accompanying him through the workday. Dominick later recognizes that Ralph was the crew’s best worker: focused and consistent even in the heat. The detail complicates the twins’ first impression of Ralph as an antisocial observer, turning an initially conspicuous presence into a reliable colleague.

Work, Family, and Local Options

The twins’ public works jobs contrast with Ray’s view of what young men should do after high school. He opposed paying for their college educations, citing the cost and his suspicions about colleges, and argued that they should work or join the Navy. He also proposed getting them jobs at Electric Boat as apprentice pipe fitters, electricians, or welders, some of which came with draft deferments. For Ray, such labor meant a wage and a contribution to the household; the novel places that practical outlook against their mother’s belief that college could keep her sons safer from the Vietnam War.

By the time the twins take seasonal public works jobs, employment is not only an argument about their future but also a way to leave the house during the day. For Dominick, outdoor labor offers a welcome counterpoint to the books and shared dormitory life of the previous year. The department’s work does not resolve the family’s disagreements about education, military service, or the war, but it gives the brothers a concrete source of income and a temporary daily independence.

The Department in a Changing Regional Economy

The novel later places the department’s local labor within a broader regional history centered on Electric Boat. For the second half of the twentieth century, the nuclear-submarine manufacturer was described as the area’s economic backbone. Ray’s earlier proposal to send the twins into shipyard trades reflects that dependence, while a later discussion of possible Navy contract cancellations and layoffs shows how vulnerable workers remained to defense spending. Leo Blood worries that a reduction in Seawolf contracts could cost Electric Boat workers their jobs and hears that a casino might eventually employ thousands.

The post–Cold War account marks a major shift: Electric Boat has reduced its workforce to a small fraction of its former payroll, and residents call the once-booming shipyard the ghost yard. Meanwhile, the Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, opened in September 1992, has expanded and is credited in the narration with employing seventy-five thousand people. These changes are not actions of the Three Rivers Public Works Department, but they place its 1969 seasonal jobs in a town and region whose employment possibilities are repeatedly reshaped by industry, war, and economic transition.