So, I had an afternoon to kill in my hometown of Price and decided to visit East Carbon, a wilderplex consisting of three subdivisions: Dragerton, Sunnyside, and Columbia. All three started out as coal mining camps, back when workers had to live within walking distance of work. Nowadays, if you live in East Carbon and want to work, you’ll be facing a long commute, as there are next to no jobs available locally.
Back when I was growing up, East Carbon was a thriving coal mining mecca with its own high school, movie theater, bowling alley and burger drive-in. Since Price was without a bowling alley, my friends and I used to venture to East Carbon to bowl—which, before the advent of the automatic pin setter, was quite risky. I remember the time Danny Madsen rolled his ball before the pin setter had vacated the pit. Presently a very angry young man came storming toward us and delivered a sharp blow to Danny’s head. Strike? How does one keep score at an interactive bowling alley?
On another occasion our scout troop had travelled to East Carbon to swim—Price having no indoor swimming pool at the time. I made the tragic mistake of stepping onto the diving board before a local tough named Charles Fluke had dived off the other end. Fluke immediately shot out of the water like an enraged orca and punched ME in the head.
By and by, we decided it was a lot safer never to trespass on East Carbon turf, and in fact even after all these years I was a bit apprehensive of what I might encounter there. What I found were a lot of shuttered businesses, dilapidated dwellings, and lots and lots of cars—at least two or three vehicles per driveway.
What became of all those juvenile delinquents from the Fifties, I wondered? As it turns out, they’ve grown paunches and no longer throw punches. However, they still wear their Levi’s cuffed and hair slicked back while driving the coolest cars, listening to rock and roll and squeezing the squeeziest babes. In other words, even though East Carbon has pretty much dried up economically, it remains a hotbed of rockabilly culture.
High priest of rockabilly was the late celebrated car customizer Bo Huff, whose legacy is celebrated in East Carbon each July—according to a faded poster I spotted in the window of an abandoned business. Like me, Bo was born in the spring of 1943; unlike me, he had the good sense not to sell his 1950 Mercury in order to cover college tuition. Talk about trading the family milk cow for a handful of magic beans!
Huff’s customized Merc’ is among the coolest lead sleds ever, but is only one of hundreds he fabricated in his lifetime. Today his son Junior Huff carries on the family tradition in a cluttered shop surrounded by rusty automotive carcasses just waiting to be transformed into rolling works of art. I found him tack welding tail fins to the rear end of a 1955 Oldsmobile for a client in nearby Kenilworth, which is still another faded Carbon County coal camp. Say what you will about the teenagers of the Nineteen Fifties: Most of them, with the exception of the idiot who traded his 1950 Mercury for a diploma from Brigham Young University–they certainly had their priorities straight!
