Gillette

In those 18 years, Gillette, a small town in northeastern Wyoming, has changed from a group of houses and a railroad depot servicing a ranching and farming community to a mining boomtown, growing at a rate of 15 to 20 percent a year.

Gillette is a dusty, bustling coal-mining center in north-eastern Wyoming, bisected by a railroad operated by Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., which delivers coal to such cities as Chicago and Centralia, Wash.

By one estimate, there are as many full-time craft artists in the United States as there are people in the town of Gillette, Wyoming. Never heard of Gillette? Well, no wonder; like the universe of craft artists, it has a relatively small population.

In the men's room he watched a man about his own age pathetically trying to shave a five-day beard with a rusty Gillette razor he had probably found in a trash bin.