from "Out Here on Our Own" by J.J. Anselmi

J.J. Anselmi; Photographs by Jordan Utley | Out Here on Our Own: An Oral History of an American Boomtown | Bison Books | 2022 | 192 Pages

Rocket City

Following the economic slump of the fifties and sixties, Rock Springs saw a meteoric energy boom in the late seventies. My parents, Stephanie and Jay, lived, met, and worked in Rock Springs during that time. They came of age in a place of extremes, a place where prostitution was openly accepted and everyone had cash, a place where you could get drive-thru liquor and any drug you wanted with ease.

As I listened to people tell me about this era, it made perfect sense that the town would capture the interest of Dan Rather and 60 Minutes—and that there would be a murder as infamous as Sheriff Ed Cantrell shooting his deputy, Michael Rosa, not to mention the many other killings that occurred in Rock Springs. Considering the thrash-tempo recklessness of the era, those things seem inevitable.

The following pages offer stories from people who moved to Rock Springs for what’s now become its most notorious boom—and from those who watched their hometown mutate into something they no longer recognized.

Stephanie Wessel Anselmi: Rock Springs was fucking wild during the seventies.

Jay Anselmi: The boom started not long after I graduated high school in 1975. There were a lot of good-paying jobs around here in the trona patch, and oil and gas was starting up pretty good. In the late seventies is when they had everything from K Street and the prostitutes. There were a lot of jobs, a lot of industrial work, and a lot of drugs. A guy could make just as much money around here with one of these jobs as he would if he had a college degree.

Les Georgis: Jim Bridger, the coal-fueled power plant and mine, came in and created some good jobs. The town moved up.

Jack Smith: We went from a town of 10,000 people to a town of 30,000 people in what seemed like overnight.

Lisa Spanjers: They’d charge a lot for rent in Rock Springs because of the demand. My apartment back in the seventies was $400 a month, which would’ve been enough to get a nice place in a city.

Judy Roderick: They were desperate back then. They lived anywhere they could. People would come knocking on your front door to ask if they could put a tent in your front yard.

Nate Martin: People were living in camps and caves. 

Laura: My dad and his brother hopped on a train car in Sacramento and rode all the way to Rock Springs. They almost froze to death going over Donner Pass and a few other places in the mountains. They had nothing, no money or anything. They just wanted to get out of their situation in California. Both of my parents grew up with several siblings in pretty intense poverty. So they wanted to go where the money was. My dad thought he could get a job in one of the mines, and that’s what he ended up doing. He worked at Bridger Coal for twenty-five years. He was a dragline operator out there, which is a dangerous job.

Robert B. Rhode: The Bridger mine was connected with the power plant by a seventy-foot-wide highway for the gigantic coal haulers that carried 110 tons in a single load at speeds of more than forty miles an hour. In 1977 the power plant consumed five million tons from a coal mine that could eventually be 4,000 feet wide and ten miles long.

Jay Anselmi: I got a job with Pacific Power and Light, which is the company that owned the Bridger plant and mine. I was twenty-three and worked as a maintenance helper for a few years, then as an ash disposal operator driving these seventy-five-ton trucks filled with coal ash. We’d dump the ash from the coal they burned in the plant. You’d work twelve-hour shifts. You had bottom ash and fly ash. The bottom ash wasn’t too bad because it was more solid. The fly ash was like flour. You had to wear a respirator so you didn’t breathe it in. It would blow everywhere in the wind and get real cute. One guy would drive and one guy would be in back to make sure you’re in the right spot. You’d bang on the truck to tell them to stop or keep going. They’d have us rotate between day, swing, and graveyard shifts. Between the swing and graveyard, you’d only get a day and a half off. That could break you down if you didn’t get good sleep. 

There were all different kinds of people from all over who worked out there.

Ginny Spain: I was a nurse in Rock Springs, so I easily found jobs. I had a job at the nursing home just up from Hickory Street, and then a nurse position opened up out at Jim Bridger. I loved the job. It was all men, for one. That I liked immensely. I hardly remember any other women working there, except for just a few. It was also a very steady job. I made some good friends there, like this little cowboy guy who’d take me horseback riding. We’d ride horses and tie them up at the bar. We’d ride down the dirt road straight there.

I had to walk around all the job sites at the power plant and tell people to put their goggles on, stuff like that. A lot of times they didn’t wear goggles. I also saw a lot of finger injuries. People would smash their nails, so I’d have to drill a hole in the nail to release the pressure. They’d drop stuff on their toes. Drilling through their nails was definitely not fun. I also saw a lot of burns, which was horrible, because it would peel the skin off. With a burn on one guy’s forearm, all the skin was rippled back. I had to take him into town because I couldn’t handle it myself.

Lisa Spanjers: I met a boy in Minnesota that I ended up marrying, but he got back on drugs, and I moved back to California. He decided he was going to Rock Springs with a bunch of guys to

make it rich during the boom. A bunch of them went together. I think there were eight of them.

When they were in Rock Springs, he started telling me that he misses me and still loves me, all this stuff—that he was going to come out and get me in California. We were both eighteen. He came out but didn’t tell me he had a kilo of pot in the trunk. We got married in Vegas and ended up in Wyoming the next morning in a 1971 Pinto with no heat during the middle of winter. I remember driving into Wyoming and having to stop to scrape ice off the windows. We ended up living in a little trailer where all his friends also lived. He failed to mention before all this that there were ten guys to one girl in Rock Springs, and that’s probably why he married me.

He didn’t tell me about the pot until we got there. I’d never been to a town like it, and I had traveled a lot with my mom. How do you explain a place like Rock Springs? I called my mom after three days and told her I wanted to come home, that I’d made a mistake. But she told me to stick it out. My first idea to make money was that I’d sell pot. People were always coming over to the trailer.

My husband took me over to hang out with this couple he knew, and that was the first time I ever drank. I didn’t like it at first and wanted to leave, but he wasn’t being very cool about it. So I left, thinking he would come after me. He didn’t. Three guys picked me up in a pickup. They were the nicest guys in the world. I couldn’t remember what street we lived on, so these guys drove me around for two hours until we finally found the trailer.

Ginny Spain: There were all these trailers full of guys who worked on the oil rigs. The high ratio of men to women was great for picking what you were interested in, that’s for sure. And most of them were making good money. It could also get scary. There were bar fights; there were guns everywhere. You could just drive around with your shotgun or rifle in the back window. My husband had his in the back window. There were usually fights in the bars. 

Anywhere there were a lot of men, there would be women looking. The guys would get off work and go to the bars, and every woman knew there were a lot of men at the bars. I actually didn’t feel like anyone was preying on me or being threatening. Lots of flirting, though.

Lisa Spanjers: There were so many trailers where there’d be groups of guys from different places. You’d have six guys from Missouri, or six guys from Michigan, or wherever, and they’d all pack into these trailers. They’d live in the trailers, work in the oil field, and then, as soon as they had money, head back home. A lot of those workers came just to make money, and all they’d do was drink and party; or they’d put their heads down, focus on work, and send money to their families back home. 

I eventually got a job working for Mountain Fuel and started making good money, too. Before that I was a maid at the Holiday Inn. When I worked at the Holiday, there were a couple scary incidents. One of the other maids got raped in the hotel. That was it for me. So yeah, it was starting to get a little scary here and there. I was in some really crazy situations but somehow always came out unscathed.

Stephanie Wessel Anselmi: This one night, I’m not shitting you, we saw our friend—everyone called her Tex Ass—throw a guy right over a car. Just right over the top of it.

Tammy Curtis Morley: Shit yeah, I remember what it was like in Rock Springs during the seventies. There were a lot of places where my dad wouldn’t let me work. Some of my friends worked at the A&W as carhops. My dad said absolutely not, because it was too dangerous. Two of my friends from high school were abducted from the A&W. One was put in the trunk, and one was raped. I look back and feel thankful to my dad for not letting me do what all my friends were doing. 

We had a great time working at the answering service. You had to be able to handle a multitude of things. You had a switchboard, you had a phone. It was a good job. My sister talks about what it was like going to school when Dad was sober. She was a little princess. When I was getting up to go to school, Dad was getting up to get his Crown Royal out of the cupboard. He gambled all night. My sister’s and my life were totally different. Dad was working in the oil field when she grew up; he was at the pool hall when I was a kid.

Adapted from Out Here on Our Own: An Oral History of an American Boomtown by J.J. Anselmi by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.
© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

J.J. Anselmi grew up in a Wyoming mining town. He’s the author of Out Here on Our Own: An Oral History of an American Boomtown; Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom, Sludge, and Post-metal; and Heavy: A Memoir of Wyoming, BMX, Drugs, and Heavy Fucking Music. He wrote the liner notes for the 2017 reissue of Sepultura’s classic thrash record, Chaos A.D., and his writing has been featured in VICE, The New Republic, The A.V. Club, Revolver, and JSTOR Daily. An active musician, he lives with his family in Southern California.