PRICE — Joe Piccolo, full-time mechanic and part-time mayor, sits in his City Hall office in the middle of the afternoon to give an out-of-town reporter a diagnostic update on how his town is running nine months after the Crandall Canyon mine tragedy.

He rests easily in the chair the taxpayers bought. There's a grease smudge on his shirt and a tire gauge in his pocket next to his pens. Just as Rudy Giuliani fit New York City, Joe Piccolo fits Price, domain of the working man and hub of Utah's coal country.

Piccolo would have no doubt been a coal miner himself if it hadn't been for a cave-in on April 25, 1957, that took the life of the father who was his namesake.

The roof collapsed that day on the Bear Canyon mine, killing Joe's dad and two other miners who were working the same seam of coal, as fate would have it, that miners were working in nearby Crandall Canyon last August when their roof collapsed, killing six and three more who tried to save them.

As Mayor Joe Piccolo jumped in his car and raced from Price to the Crandall Canyon tragedy last summer, 50 years disappeared just like that.

When he saw the siren atop the school in Huntington where anxious families awaited word, he was 6 years old again, clutching his mother's hand.

When the mine superintendent waded among the tense crowd to announce, "Will the following people come with me," he remembered a time when another mine superintendent said those same words.

"I would have been a miner, I'm sure of it," he says, "if not for that."

He became a mechanic instead, and in 2001 he ran for mayor — and won.

No one could have understood any better what coal country was feeling last August, or been better prepared to know what needed to be done.

"As mayor, when things turn south, your primary job is to lead the way back," says Piccolo. "I knew that. I felt I was prepared to know that. We needed to come together as a community and help everyone get back on their feet.

"My mother was 42 years old, in the prime of her life, when my father died," he reminisces, "and the whole community got together and helped her ...

" ... just like this community has come together now."

The mayor doesn't try to sugarcoat the situation. He acknowledges that Crandall Canyon was "a tornado in the side of the ship" as far as Carbon and neighboring Emery Counties are concerned. The economy was booming last summer, optimism was high and then the roof fell in. In addition to the loss of nine lives, Crandall Canyon started a chain reaction that shut down 2 1/2 coal mines and put 400 miners out of work.

Unemployment is up. Per capita income is down.