Post–Cold War era

The Post–Cold War era is the setting for a regional economic reversal in eastern Connecticut: Electric Boat, once the area’s industrial backbone, contracts while the gaming industry grows into a major source of employment and wealth. The change gives new meaning to the Birdsey family’s earlier dependence on shipyard work and defense spending, and places the Wequonnoc Nation at the center of the region’s emerging prosperity.

The defense economy in family memory

Before this later transition, work and education were already bound to the military economy. Ray opposed paying for the twins’ college education, arguing that they could work, join the Navy, or take apprentice jobs at Electric Boat. Those jobs might offer deferments, and submarine construction, in his words, “backed the attack.” His argument made defense production both a practical route to wages and a patriotic alternative to college.

That dependence was not only ideological. In 1969, after their first year away at college, Dominick and Thomas found seasonal work with the Three Rivers Public Works Department. Jobs were scarce, and Ray’s acquaintance with its superintendent helped them get hired. The work paid minimum wage and brought heat rash and poison ivy, but it also gave the brothers paychecks and time outside the house. The later decline of Electric Boat thus touches a landscape in which work had long meant military industry, local public employment, and the limited choices available to young workers.

Electric Boat’s decline

In the post–Cold War period, Electric Boat lays off workers until its payroll is only a small fraction of its former size. The once-booming shipyard becomes known as “The ghost yard.” That phrase turns industrial contraction into a visible absence: a workplace that had sustained the region remains present in memory even as its former scale disappears.

The yard carries particular significance for Dominick and Thomas. Long before the layoffs, they had witnessed the launch of the Nautilus there and posed for a photograph with the First Lady. The contrast between that remembered spectacle and the diminished shipyard links regional economic change to the brothers’ own history, making the loss more than an abstract shift in employment.

Casino expansion and tribal prosperity

As defense employment dwindles, gaming expands. The Wequonnoc Moon Casino opens in September 1992 and exceeds even optimistic expectations for economic revival. Over its first six years, construction and expansion continue, producing a complex of casinos and hotels off Route 22. The resort employs seventy-five thousand people, while cars and buses stream to it day and night. Plans even consider bringing gamblers up the Sachem River and connecting Boston by a high-speed private railroad.

The new prosperity also changes the position of the Wequonnoc Nation. The narrator reports that its 415 members are millionaires. At the same time, the old state hospital grounds, once part of the nation’s sacred hunting and fishing lands, may revert to the tribe, with tribal officials and the Governor of Connecticut negotiating over their return and possible expansion. The era therefore brings two linked reversals: the retreat of the region’s defense industry and the rise of a tribal gaming economy, alongside renewed negotiations over land once taken from the Wequonnoc Nation.