Parade of Papers Cover the Beat of Pahrump, Nev.

They don’t like to call it a newspaper war in the self-proclaimed “heart of the new Old West.” But there really isn’t any other way to describe the goings-on in this fast-growing backwater.

Since the end of August, when the upstart Independent Reporter published Volume 1, No. 1, four scrappy newspapers have been documenting the life and times of Pahrump’s 25,000 or so residents.

That’s right. Four newspapers and one stoplight. Four newspapers and one grocery store. Four newspapers and five nearby brothels. Four newspapers and no mayor, no hospital, no police department, no building codes, no zoning.

Shoot, four newspapers and not everyone even has a phone yet, as Pahrump cruises toward the millennium in the brush-filled desert, tucked between Death Valley and the Nevada nuclear test site.

They only got pavement here in the ‘50s. Electricity arrived a decade later. Most homes still are mobile, most roads still gravel, most meals still largely chicken-fried, most indoor air still tobacco-tinged.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if tomorrow we didn’t have five papers,” says a philosophical Harry Ford, Pahrump’s self-anointed historian and resident who has lived here the longest. “It’s wide open. In Pahrump, you can live any way you want. You can live on a golf course or the side of a mountain. . . . Here, if you have a copy machine, you can have a paper.”

Ford is only stretching the truth a size or so. Pahrump’s first--and now defunct--newspaper was a 1960s-era, 10-cent, single-page journal, mimeographed in bleeding purple ink and driven to each stoop by the publisher herself.

Today, the region’s biggest brothel owner also owns the weekly Pahrump Valley Gazette. Page 1 of the Gazette is straight news. But the editorial page is the private venue of Joe Richards, owner of brothels called Mabel’s and Cherry Patch I and II, along with two massage parlors--Venus and Madame Butterfly. (“We’ve got bodies! An so sexy!” reads one prominent, typographically challenged billboard in town.)

“Whether you hate him or love him, he won’t let you ignore him,” boasts the slogan of Richards’ personal published pulpit, dubbed “On Target,” where he takes establishment Pahrump to task.

“There’s people who won’t advertise in the Gazette; it’s just because I own the paper,” Richards says in an interview. “I don’t kiss their ass, pardon my language. I’m my own man.”

Two of the other weekly newspapers--Dick Stromatt’s Independent Reporter and B.J. Stromatt’s Valley Observer--are published by the opposing sides of one very recently divorced couple who now publicly vie for Pahrump’s advertising dollars.

“There’s enough room here for three papers, as long as one is mine,” says B.J. Stromatt. She grins, pauses, refers to her ex: “If he makes it, that’s all well and good.”

And the fourth paper? That would be the Pahrump Valley Times, at 26 years old the longest-running and most traditional local periodical. And therefore the dullest one, by simple comparison.

“People enjoy the papers,” says longtime resident Mary Ford. “They read them all. The one you really believe is the Pahrump Valley Times. But you read them all.”

How Pahrump got four newspapers when the likes of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Chicago struggle to support two dailies says as much about this small town--do not call it a city--as it does about the journals’ very independent readers.

At a vast 360 square miles, Pahrump is not a city. Its voters decided--not once, but twice--to rebuff the evils of an extra layer of government. As residents of Nevada’s Nye County, the heart of the national debate over private property rights, they come by their wariness naturally.

Sure, they worried that they couldn’t afford to replace county services with municipal versions, that it would cost too much to wave goodbye to the Sheriff’s Department and greet a local police force. But that’s only half of the story.

“People automatically think city, and they think overbearing rules and regulations,” says Rich Thurlow, publisher of the Times. “We’re very independent here. We like to do things our way. The thought of having a code in place to tell you how long your eaves should be, that’ll never happen here. We’re never going to ban barbecues or leaf blowers.”

Folks here are so independent, says Dick Stromatt, that they actually need four very separate outlets. After all, he says, you’ve got your “constitutionalists, senior citizens, good old boys, a few ordinary people.”

“There are people out there who won’t buy the Times because they think Rich Thurlow is too close to the politicians,” Stromatt says. “They won’t buy the Gazette because of Joe Richards. There are people who won’t buy the Observer.”

And finally, to his chagrin, there are those who call the post office and demand that the Independent Reporter, which is mailed free to 11,500 households, not be put in their mailboxes.

“Everyone out here,” Stromatt says, “has an opinion.”

Independence and isolation go hand in hand here. Pahrump is a long and twisting 65 miles from downtown Las Vegas, on a road that averages a serious traffic accident every month and a half or so. The county seat of Tonopah--home of Nye’s only hospital and the destination for all jurors--is 165 miles to the north.

When Ford moved here as a boy in 1944, there were an estimated 20 whites and about 50 Southern Paiute Indians. Fast forward to 1980, when Iris Rowland, office manager for the town council, did the town census.

“We had to scrape to find 3,000 people,” Rowland says. “We were only supposed to go back three times [to any residence], but we went back as many as six to get people to sign up.”

By 1990, the population had grown to 12,500; today it is believed to have at least doubled. Some peg the number of Pahrump residents even higher, but tabulation is too difficult for any measure of certainty. Most official estimates are made using telephone and electrical hookups as a base. In Pahrump, enough people aren’t connected to either system that it’s anyone’s guess.

The only sure thing is a population explosion; officials estimate that on average 10 new people move here each day. And townsfolk can see the cars coming, many filled with disgruntled former Las Vegans fleeing from their own recent miracle of growth.

“I hate to see it grow so fast,” Rowland laments. “The last five years, phew!”

On the bright side, however, with growth comes shopping opportunity. Smith’s Food and Drug Center now gleams on the main drag, Nevada 160. Lucky and Sav-on are under construction. Chief Auto Parts is here. Wal-Mart rumors spice the air.

With growth come sidewalks--at least a couple. In Pahrump’s high-rent district at the foot of Mt. Charleston, close to Nevada’s only winery, a new subdivision boasts “paved streets, sidewalks, water, sewer, underground utilities.” With growth come McDonald’s and Burger King and Terrible’s Town, a new casino with a Baskin-Robbins and Kenny Rogers chicken outlet. And with growth come the media, for better or for worse. KPVM-TV began broadcasting Sept. 14, with live coverage of the Harvest Festival. Local news programming is promised soon.

Although the Gazette and the Times have covered the valley for decades in one incarnation or another, the Observer is only 3 years old, and the Independent Reporter has yet to hit two months.

Richards, whose expertise is admittedly not journalistic, bought the Gazette in 1990 because newspapers intrigue him. And so does money.

“I’m a businessman, and it’s a good business investment,” says the reclusive Richards, who hasn’t been seen in public in nearly a decade. “I could see the explosion of Pahrump growing, and a newspaper in that area is going to do nothing but skyrocket in time, the way the town is exploding.”

The Gazette’s circulation dropped from about 11,000 to about 5,000 after Richards bought the paper and the Valley Observer came to town. Advertising revenues also dropped.

But the Gazette has improved journalistically since Publisher Mary Ann McNeill, a former food editor at the defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, was hired two years ago. The paper recently won 13 awards--including one for general excellence--from the Nevada Press Assn.

“I like to say that if you really want to know what’s going on, you pick up the Gazette,” says McNeill, who was fired in February after tussling with Richards over journalistic standards and rehired in April. Still, “There’s a lot of stuff we don’t do correctly, because we don’t have the resources.”

Advertising revenues are improving slowly but surely, McNeill says. And the Gazette, she acknowledges, has a financial cushion to keep it in business even through tough times--Mabel’s and the Cherry Patch I and II.

Down the highway at the stodgier Times, publisher Thurlow prides himself on putting out the largest, most serious, most thorough periodical in town.

Two years ago, the Times expanded from a 50-cent weekly to a twice-a-week paper with a circulation of 7,000 to 8,000. Unlike his competitors, he says, he doesn’t worry about attracting ads.

“There are some very real expenses to owning a paper that go far beyond owning a computer and a printer,” Thurlow says with a sniff at his smaller competitors. “Common sense tells you we’re not going to have four [papers] for very long.”