Schumacher Offers Short Course on Pahrump Papers By Mark Smith, " Pahramp Valley Times", March 19,2010 Geoff Schumacher was a kid in Pahrump Valley High School when the journalism bug took a nip out of his hide. In the early 1980s he decided to take a chance with Fred Cook, owner of the small "Pahrump News", which was competing with Milt Bozanic's "Pahrump Valley Times". As he explained Cook's position to his audience at the Pahrump Museum last Saturday, *Maybe he was just terribly desperate. That's probably what it was." In any event, Schumacher was taken aboard by Cook at the princely rate of 10 cents a word, or roughly one buck for a typical story. But he leamed quickly, or as he put it, "I wrote a lot of words for Fred Cook." Today Schumacher is the community publications director for the Las Vegas Revievv-Journal in which capacity he oversees publications as diverse as several small papers in Hawaii, "El Tiempo Libr, e" and as it happens, the "Pahrump Valley Times". He has published two well-received books as well, "Sun, Sin & Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas" and "Howard Hughes: Power, Prowia & Polace Intrigae" Coming up may be a third on Pahrump. Schumacher said he sees both advantages and disadvantages to writing histories that focus on the period since 1940: For one thing, he actually gets to chat with men and women who are still alive and remember what they did and witnessed. But on the other hand, he said, "Some of them might know more about the subject than I do.' Saturday's talk was a brief outline of the history of journalism in the Pahrump Valley, and there was more of it than many might realize. Today we have the "PVT", the "Pahrump Mirror", KNYE-FM Radio, and a trio of television outlets. But in the past, as many as four local newspapers at a time were tilling the journalistic soil. There were so many that, on one occasion, several major national and even international newspapers sent correspondents to town to see how on earth all four survived in such a small community. Bozanic had enioyed an intriguing career long before he took a look at Pahrump. A former radio DJ, he became the late- night movie programmer on Channel 13 when it was competing with Howard Hughes' Channel 8. Hughes had the habit of watching the late shows, and as the channel's owner, if he happened to doze off and miss a portion of the feature, he would call the station to have it restarted from the beginning to catch it all. That resulted in hundreds of confused views who suddenly saw a movie end and then begin all over again, in mid career. In 1969 Channel 13 cbanged formats, and the next year Bozanic decided to start his own paper in Pabnrmp. It was a far cry from today's PW. Designated "Nevada West & the Pahrunp Valley Times", it was a tabloid that was designed to promote the effort to sell and develop land here. Schumacher said there might have been 500 subscribers in the valley, but 30,000 copies migbt be printed and tumed over to the land developers for them to send out copies to all comers. Virtually every monthly issue from January 1971 forward featured at least one pneumatic babe, and often many more, posing in a bikini on a sailboat at Lake Mead-which may have struck distant readers as some place just down the road. But as Schumacher leamed recently from Bozanic, there was also a practical reason for the photos. There just wasn't a lot of news at the time, and he needed the photos to fill the paper. Schumacher laughed softly as he recalled Bozanic's first big story: 'Opening the nudist colony. Milt was all over that $tory.' A woman named Kathy Ledford started a paper called the Pahrump Valley Star in 1972 and, said Schumacher, "covered local news better than [Bozanic] did." In 1976 Bozanic dropped the "NV West" part of the name and became a weekly. He went head to head with Ledford before finally ending the competition through the simple expedient of buying her out in 1981. Now Bozanic was peculiar in at least one way: He never lived in Pahrump. But with more and more local news, he hired a fellow named Joe McCauley. McCauley reported, wrote and did all the other things that make a newspaper happen. Enter Fred Cook and Schumacher. By getting to know McCauley, Schumacher became something of a competing apprentice and learned a lot of basic journalism. He also often covered himself in sports, playing in a basebajj game, for instance, and then turning around to write it up for the paper. And then McCauley offered him a job-'$5 for a single story. Schumacher graduate€d in 1984 and went on to UNLV, where he decided to pursue journalism on the student "Rebel Yell" paper. He walked in, approached the editor and asked about a job. He was stunned when she responded, "How would you like to be the sports editor?" "I proceeded to do a very sub-par job," Schumacher recalled. Instead of huddling with the players on the field and in the locker room after a game, he would hang out in the stands with his buddies. But the bug had bitten, and when he transferred to UNR, he began to take journalism a lot more seriously. Through that period there were other papers, notably the "Pahrump Tribune" and then the "Death Valley Gateway Gazette", which tended to focus on Beatty. Brothel-owner Joe Richards eventually took it over and it became the "Pahrump Gazette", today the "Pahrunp Mirror". And for a time Stephens Media Corp.,the Review-Journal's parent company, had a "Pahrump View" here as well. In 1989 Bozanic, tired after 19 years, sold out to Joe and Rich Thurlow, who entered upon a period when the paper and the town grew like crazy. Finally, in 20O2, Stephens Media bought it and so far has continued it as a twice-weekly production. Publisher Marie Wujek, said Schumachei 'does a rronderful job." Of all the papers he oversees, he said 'The one I have to worry about the least is the "Pahrump Valley Times-" Schumacher admitted the experience has been a heady one, from ranking in a dime a word to supervising this paper along with several others.