Dan's Papers - April 11, 2008 - Dan's Book Review: Welcome to Shirley

Kelly McMasters' Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, is a story that needs to be told. McMasters recounts her experiences growing up in the hard knock town of Shirley while weaving in the raw reality of what it means to live in the shadow of a federal nuclear laboratory that has been contaminating the town's water supply for decades.

In effect, this memoir paints a beautiful picture of Shirley, a town that from its conception was full of contradictions, its beauty being the most ironic. With a bay, rivers and a vast wild refuge, Shirley is a waterside town that was built in the 1950s by a boy from Brooklyn named Walter Turnbull Shirley (Walter T.). He also built Mastic and Mastic Beach and as McMasters says, "Locals see the three towns as a single entity and usually refer to them as Shirley and the Mastics, like a singing group. Soon after we moved to our new house, I learned that the towns are also often referred to as Drastic Mastic, Mistake Beach and Shirlée." Like most of the young men in Brooklyn at the time, Walter T. had signed up in the Great War and was put on a train and shipped out to Camp Upton (Yaphank). This is when he saw his first tree and his first glimpse of the area on the South Shore that would one day bear his name. Walter T. mimicked Levitt's (of Levittown fame) low-cost strategy of designing houses atop concrete slab foundations, sans basements, and the population grew. Yet the fatal flaw of Walter T. was that he never drew up any formal plans for the town and just started in one place and kept building - no real main street, no sewer systems - his promising campaign to offer people cheap housing using the slogans, "town of flowers" and "where the country meets the sea," was well into play.

McMasters spent her few years traveling between the "bunny hills" of the Catskill Mountains and "bunkers" of New Jersey where her father taught both golf and ski lessons. When the family finally settled into affordable Shirley, it was not long before they realized how tight this community was. All the children on the block were friends and picked which house to eat at depending on whose mother was at work or food shopping. Summers were celebrated with block parties on the Fourth of July, a tradition led by the neighborhood's favorite citizen, "glow in the dark" Jerry. He was the dad who everyone wished was their own yet his day job at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is owned by the Department of Energy and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, was never spoken about. McMasters conjures up memories of Jerry coming home from work. "He would hold us back by our foreheads, shouting that he'd been 'green-slimed' - a term from a popular Nickelodeon television show at the time - at work and had to wash up." McMasters can only imagine what his work was like, cleaning up nuclear spills, burying carcasses of dead lab animals, or dumping toxic chemicals in 18-wheeler trucks and boxcars.

Throughout the years, McMasters family was accepted and adored and the neighborhood is in good morale. Yet when economic crises and other factors led to their move from the block, Jerry steps in and helps them out. And it is not long after this that doctors find tumors on Jerry's brain. This is when things in the memoir lapse to the dark side and McMasters takes a long look at the cloaked laboratory in her backyard. McMasters researches the fact that Brookhaven National Laboratory has a nuclear reactor and that much of the research focuses on arms control and weapons disposal, with a large portion of the information classified. Besides all the creepy, black hole creating monsters that Brookhaven is hiding behind steel doors and overlooking the beautiful Atlantic Ocean, it's the constant contamination of the area's water supply that turns out to be the largest revelation. Cesium 137, Europium 154, Plutonium 239, and Radium 226 don't sound yummy.

Welcome to Shirley is written with passion and humility and McMasters clear and vivid style keeps readers on edge. McMasters writes a complex tribute to a once promising summertime beach community filled with broken people defeated by the emergence of cancer clusters and regarded as damaged goods. A must read for Long Islanders.