'Welcome to Shirley' by Kelly McMasters
BOOK REVIEW
A memoir of life in a nuclear research town
THIS review is being written by a white-trash guy who grew up in village a lot like author Kelly McMasters' blue-collar hometown, Shirley, on Long Island's south shore. It's one of those places beaten up by the weather and changing economic conditions, one that rich people speed by on their way to the fashionable Hamptons. Places such as Patchogue, where I grew up, Shirley and its neighbor, Mastic, have not been the subject of much literature.
McMasters is correcting that with a disturbing, ambitious book twining her life in Shirley in the 1980s with the relationship the town and its residents have to Brookhaven National Laboratory, a nearby high-energy physics and nuclear research complex, and the potentially disastrous environmental consequences of that geographical fact.
The basic story McMasters tells in "Welcome to Shirley" is interesting. She is the daughter of a stay-at-home mom and a failed professional golfer turned golf course pro who comes to town on the promise of a job at a nearby down-at-the-heels course. It turns out to lack grass and is owned by a sinister gangster. Her dad becomes a traveling golf equipment salesman and her mom becomes a grief counselor.
McMasters, a clever, inquisitive child, quickly discovers exactly what Shirley is: an unlovely housing sprawl whose only center is a series of strip malls along two major roads. Built after World War II to provide very low-cost summer houses for working-class city people, Shirley is situated on a sandy pine barren near a beautiful ocean beach. But by the time the McMasters family arrives in the early 1980s, it is a year-round community of tiny, battered houses on very small lots, inhabited by those who service the winners, ex-winners and those who hope to be winners in the surrounding affluent communities.
McMasters takes pleasure in describing her many young friends and the closeness that develops between the families. We too are devastated when the most popular dad on the street dies suddenly of an awful cancer. Occasionally, she shares a lovingly remembered resentment, such as losing out to another eighth-grader -- "Most of us knew her family name because her father was on the school board" -- in a contest to rename Shirley when real estate hustlers decide to upscale the town.
