On a September afternoon in the old brick restaurant on Whitesville, West Virginia's main drag, Elizabeth "Punky" Casto tossed a boa over her shoulder, hiked up her lacy red dress, and pointed her finger at the gathering crowd. It's her Betty Boop routine — an impersonation of the demure, 1930s cartoon character. Once, Punky performed the routine for me in her quiet living room, voice frayed and movements stiff from 84 years of age. But this time she had an audience — a few dozen friends gathered for the grand opening of the Boone-Raleigh Community Center.

Carrie Lou Jarrell and Elizabeth 'Punky' Casto dress up for their performance at the opening of the Boone-Raleigh Community Center in Whitesville, West Virginia. Photo/Lorelei Scarbro

I had visited Punky a few months before to gather tape for my radio story about Whitesville's line dancers. At the time, the old brick restaurant where they practiced had recently closed. It had been years, in fact, since the building had kept a thriving business, cursed by boom-and-bust cycles in a town that many say was never meant to exist without coal. If you ask Carrie Lou Jarrell, one of the dancers, about Whitesville's past, she'll throw back her head, roll her wide eyes, and exclaim, "Oh gosh." Then she'll tell you about the way things were.

Anything you could get in New York City was in Whitesville. They had theaters and a pool. You'd never find a parking spot on a Friday night, and you'd get knocked over walking to the football games.

But before the coal industry busted in the 1980s, life around Whitesville wasn't always as easy as Carrie Lou remembers. When she was growing up in the coal camps, Punky says she never knew that she was poor, because being poor was all that she knew.

When I interviewed Punky and Carrie Lou, both told me that Whitesville could never be revived—coal had worn down the community just as much as it had built it up, and now that the industry was declining, there was no other to replace coal. But the more they spoke about the past, I realized that it wasn't the industry they wished to revive. Instead, they were nostalgic for that feeling of youthfulness they associated with the boom times — that same lightness of spirit they feel when they go dancing in the old restaurant.

This past year, Carrie Lou and the other line dancers decided it was time to do something with the old restaurant that didn't rely on the coal industry's business. So with a group of local residents, they turned the building into a community center and marked its opening last September with a lively performance of "Old Time Rock'n Roll." It was the largest audience the line dancers had seen in a long time, and needless to say, they loved it.

What do you think are our best hopes for revitalizing Appalachia's defunct coal communities?

Listen to Sierra's story on the line dancers.