Jack Gilhooley
Boom!
Full-length play — 6w, 1m
“Thirty miles from the nearest town, down a back road clogged with ice and snow, the wind rages at a small sign reading, ‘Shirley Basin Uranium Mines, 4 miles.’ You pay no attention. You go another six miles, with the furious wind trying to shove your car off the road, churning the snow into what the Wyomingites call a ‘wind blizzard’, visibility five feet. Another sign announces ‘Shirley Basin Pop, 700; Elev. 7,100.’ You go a couple of miles down a dirt road and when the wind blizzard lets up for a second and you see, in the middle of what looks like a moonscape capped with snow, a huge clot of trailers, one after another, and nothing else. Nothing else at all.”
—Molly Ivins, The New York Times, March 28, 1978
Boom! is a tale of tough, funny, sad women left behind in Shirley Basin, Wyoming, a polluted 1980s uranium mining town destined for abandonment even by the corporate/governmental predators. Resourceful and resilient and bent on escape, they see clearly the irony of environmental devastation in one of America’s most beautiful areas.
Shirley Basin
In 1961, south of Wyoming’s Shirley Mountains, uranium mining operations started in the immense flat plain known as Shirley Basin. A few miles from the mine, a town site was established for workers and their families, concentric ovals of roads and about 200 pads for trailers and mobile homes. One permanent structure was combination store, post office and bar known as Bad Medicine Inn.
In 1978, playwright Jack Gilhooley read a story in The New York Times by Molly Ivins describing her wintery visit to that remote community. This insight into the lives of the women in this isolated area resonated in the playwright's imagination.
“That article by Molly Ivins just knocked me out of my shoes,” Gilhooley told Times reporter Herbert Mitgang a decade later. “I was struck by the whole notion of these women living in a small town called Shirley Basin in Wyoming. That's right, Shirley Basin, a town, not the name of a woman. It was a uranium mining town in the middle of nowhere. The women lived in house trailers. Due to the cold, they had to spend most of their winters inside.”
Long after reading the article by Ms. Ivins, Gilhooley went out to see Shirley Basin for himself. He stayed a few days, confirming his ideas about the place.
“I first began writing Shirley Basin in 1982,” said Gilhooley, “and the first production was at the Northlight Repertory Theater in Chicago the next year. It was directed by John Malkovich. Then it was put on in several different places around the country, including Theaterworks in Colorodo Springs and Peterborough Players in New Hampshire.”
In 1988, Shirley Basin was presented at the Nat Horne Theater on 42nd Street in New York. Program notes credited Ms. Ivins's article as the show's inspirational source, using, with her permission, the opening paragraph of her article as an introduction.
The uranium mine shut down in 1987 when operation expenses exceeded the value of the recovered mineral. The men and women and their trailer families departed. By the time Shirley Basin was staged, nothing remained of the town except the crumbling streets.
In 2004, Gilhooley reworked the play, deeming the revision significant enough to change the title from Shirley Basin to the irony-loaded Boom! Even its occupants must have suspected the boom town was destined to become a ghost town.
SHIRLEY BASIN, 2018
click to see
Drone video by Terry J. Lane
Photographs by Josephine Heidepriem
A series of images of the same locations taken in 1980 and 2011.
Click each image to see the current view.
Shirley Basin Mine to reopen
According to a 2025 news item in the Wyoming News Exchange, a new operator purchased and will reopen the Shirley Basin mine. The price of uranium has increased dramatically over the last two years due to geopolitical instability and a supply gap, leading Ur-Energy to the decision to build out and restart production.
At Winter's Bitter End, ‘Trailer Fever’
By Molly Ivins
The New York Times, March 21, 1978
SHIRLEY BASIN, Wyo. — Thirty miles from the nearest town down a back road clogged with ice and snow, the wind rages at a small sign reading “Shirley Basin Uranium Mines, 4 miles.” You pay no attention. You go another six miles, with the furious wind trying to shove your car off the road, churning the snow into what Wyomingites call a “wind blizzard.” visibility five feet. Another sign announces “Shirley Basin, Pop. 700 Elev. 7,110.” You go a couple of miles down a dirt road, and when the wind blizzard lets up for a second you see, in the middle of what looks like a moonscape capped with snow, a huge clot of trailers, one after another after another, and nothing else. Nothing else at all.
The men flock to Shirley Basin to work at the booming uranium mine down the road. The children leave the huddled trailers to go to school, when the weather permits. The women have to find other escape routes.
The women of Shirley Basin are havIng their worst time now. It's the end of a long winter, but the winter hasn't ended. The wind still screams, and there's nothing to see but the white blur outside the trailer windows. They call the trouble “trailer fever” and it gets bad this time of year. Nowhere to send the kids, nowhere to go, and for many, no one to talk to.
A gentle woman in Laramie, who lived in those circumstances for only a few months, said softly, “Now I understand child abuse.”
‘'Going to write about 'squirrelly basin,’ are you?” inquired Lennis Arthur, who works at the Lucky Me mines, “Well, people here don't have nervous breakdowns. They just go crazy.”
Actually, some of the women in Shirley Basin are tough and funny, with a hitter humor. Some of them are bright and chirrupy like the women in television advertisements. Some of them are clearly slipping, getting desperate, but they pull themselves together and offer hospitality and make vague plans to get out more, get a Tupperware franchise or maybe sell Sarah Coventry jewelry.
And then there are the ones who just sit. They look at television and drink. “I keep to myself,” they say. “I don't get out much.” “I don't know where else we'd go.” “A belt now and then helps you get through it.”
In the trailer of Cheryl Lemons (Lot No. 55) there is no despair. Mrs. Lemons, 28 years old, is a pretty woman. Her brown hair is nicely done, her trailer is neat and well decorated. She has two children and has lived in Shirley Basin for five years.
Her mother, Margaret Powell (Lot. No. 49), is an energetic woman of 51. Mrs. Powell works at the school, supposedly as a teacher's aide, “but really as a jack of all trades,” she said. Both women are passionately interested in the doings at the school. “Contract renewal time is here and GUESS who didn't get renewed?”
“Sure, people gripe and complain a lot, but not more than anywhere else,” Mrs. Powell said. “Some of them just watch TV, but you can get out if you want to. There are things to do here,”
Probably the best thing that has happened to Shirley Basin in quite a while is a formation of a Jaycees chapter. Cheryl's husband, Steve, started it after a couple of guys from Medicine Bow (32 miles away, pop. 455, one liquor store, two cafes) came to talk to him about it. He wasn't sure that it would work, but It did. Now the Jaycees bring in movies (they recently had “Cat Ballou”), and they have held a casino night, and this spring they're going to build a park. Right now, there is not one tree in Shirley Basin.
Shirley Basin has its defenders. Maurine Warman, who works in the cafe, said she wouldn't move to Casper, 30 miles to the north, because the schools there are bad. She has been in Shirley Basin for seven years.
About half the women in Shirley Basin work, some of them in clerical positions at the mine, a very few of them in rougher work at the mines, but most of them in part‐time sales work.
“Oh, do I get cabin fever!” said Nola Taylor, 25, who has three small children.
When Dick Taylor started working at Shirley Basin, their youngest baby was only a week old and there were no trailer spaces available. So Nola had to stay near her parents in another trailer camp, in upstate Wyoming, for five months. “Oh, I hated it,” she said. “I guess I cried for five months.”
Even though Nola Taylor says she still cries a lot, she is a cheerful, friendly woman, “I want to get out,” she said, “and get me something like Tupperware or Sarah Coventry. I can't stand being in the house 16 hours a day.”
The one commercial sign in the Basin advertises the Bad Medicine Inn, to wit, the bar, where a lot of citizens spend too much time, in the opinion of other citizens. The town used to belong to the Little Medicine Development Company, but it was taken over by Lucky Me, which also owns the grocery store and the cafe in the same building.
There are A, B and C lots in Shirley Basin, depending on the size of the trailer. An A lot is 60 by 10 feet, and the lot rent is taken out of the tenant's paycheck.
The single men in the town live in a dormitory and eat in a cafeteria, also owned by the company. The married folks think the single men drink more. There is an elementary school, but junior and senior high school students are bused to Medicine Bow. Sometimes they can't make it. Two weeks ago, the road was closed for four days.
There is a Baptist church and an Assembly of ‘ God church and the Seventh Day Adventists and Roman Catholics are also organized. The public library is open Tuesday, 1:30 to 4:30, and the clinic is open Wednesday from 9 to 12.
One subject that ‘gets talked about a lot, probably more than it gets done, is “trailer creeping,” or playing around, cheating.
A woman said, “The way these women gossip is so bad I'm embarrassed to have a friend of my husband come to the door of my trailer when he is away at work. I'll tell you the truth, I don't get out and around much because it's awful hard to make friends here. There is so much vicious talk.”
One bright, attractive woman who is not as bitter as some, says her problem is she “started off on the wrong foot here.” In an early effort to get involved in the community, she went to a P.T.A. meeting during one of the periodic flaps at the school. She spoke up at the meeting saying something to the effect that maybe everyone should take it easy because it wasn't, after all, very important. “They cut me for six months after that,” she said. “I really mean it, they wouldn't even speak to me.”
In Shirley Basin, little things can seem terribly important. And so the talk goes on. But the women who talk, whether they are bitter, funny or cheerful, are better off than the ones who just sit.