Recently, on a warm fall morning, Jewkes and Wilmonen stood in front of the vacant store and talked about the boom years. They remembered the dances in the recreation hall and the free movies on Thursday afternoons. For a dime, they recalled, you could see a different movie on Sunday. The mining company also ran a confectionery shop, an ice-cream parlor, a barbershop and, for a time, even a beer parlor. The company built a hospital and a baseball field and horseshoe pitching courts.

The company had rules for people who lived on its property, Wilmonen said. The children had curfews and had to bring their bikes in off the streets at night. The children knew that to break the rules might jeopardize their fathers' jobs.

Still, the miners and their families did not feel totally powerless. Wilmonen talked about national labor leader John L. Lewis with great reverence. The unions came to Carbon County about 25 years before she did. Still, every miner knows the history, that before the unions miners had to buy their own dynamite and were paid by the ton, with mine managers doing the weighing. Also, before the unions, miners were paid in script, a kind of company money that could only be used at the company store.

The coming of the unions is chronicled in a display in the mining museum in Helper. Upstairs, in the corner of one display are some letters, written in the early 1930s. The letters are from an address on Exchange Place in Salt Lake City. The owner of one of the mines wrote to his mine manager, telling him, in racist terms, not to hire any more Japanese workers. "Don't hire any Greeks, either," he wrote, "unless they were with us in the last strike."

Jewkes is well aware of patriarchal nature of a company town. "The owners really had the miners over a barrel," he says. But as a boy, he was too busy being happy to give it much thought. Of Kenilworth, he says, "It's been my whole life."

Some of his fondest memories are of sports. In elementary school, he was the town marble champ. Later, he played on the mine's baseball team. After high school, he went to in college in Price, where he played basketball. He intended to become a coach.

But then, after his freshman year, his dad asked him to help in the store. It was 1947. Droves of men were home from the war, yet no one wanted to work in the store, not with the wages you could earn on the tipple.

Jewkes' dad told him that when things leveled off he could go back to college. But the busy years kept on. By the time the store closed, in the 1960s, Jewkes' father had retired and he was the manager. At that point, Jewkes got a job delivering milk, a job that allowed him to stay in Kenilworth and raise his children where he'd been raised.