Hinsdale County in southwest Colorado is the most remote county in the lower 48. Grant Houston has run the Lake City Silver World there for nearly a half-century. Now, as he turns 70, he's looking to sell, but only to the right person.
On this week's episode of Local Motion, Houston discusses growing up in Lake City, his early journalism career, and his experiences running a newspaper in a tiny town.
Interview transcript:
Laura Palmisano: You are listening to Local Motion, KVNF's weekly public affairs program. I'm Laura Palmisano, your host for today's episode. A recent report finds 130 newspapers shut down across the U.S. last year. This includes 13 in Colorado. Research shows that losing local news sources weakens civic engagement and increases political polarization. Hinsdale County in southwestern Colorado is the most remote county in the lower 48. Grant Houston has run the Lake City Silver World there for nearly 50 years. Now, as he turns 70, he's looking to sell, but only to the right person. I spoke with Houston about growing up in Lake City, his early journalism career, and his experiences running a newspaper in a tiny town. Grant, how long have you lived in Lake City?
Grant Houston: I've lived here my whole life. I moved here when I was six-weeks-old in 1955. My dad was the first resident game warden in Lake City, which was a bit of a shock to Lake City locals, many of whom had gotten by on poaching for years or to summer residents from Texas or Arizona that caught too many fish. It was a bit of a shock to have a game warden tell you that you had to have a license and that you had to shoot game in season.
Palmisano: What was your early childhood like?
Houston: Pretty rural, not a big city. There were 90 people in Lake City at that time, and in the Lake City school there was a grand total of 18 from grades 1st through 12th.
Palmisano: From what I understand, your mom was a school teacher, too.
Houston: She was the first kindergarten teacher, at least in modern history. They may have had one in the early 20th century, but mom in 1960 was the first kindergarten and there were five of us in class.
Palmisano: Is anyone from your class still in town here?
Houston: Beth Hurd and I have been friends since she and I were in kindergarten together.
Palmisano: What was it like growing up in a town like Lake City?
Houston: Growing up in Lake city in the 60s, you had to be self-reliant. You went to grocery shopping in Gunnison once a month and stocked up. No grocery stores here that served a variety of of supplies at that point. And as far as recreation, it was delightful. You'd go off on your bike for the day with a fly rod or a camera. I got into cameras early and you were kind of on your own. You didn't have a lot of supervision.
Palmisano: Did you go to high school in Gunnison then? From what I understand, Lake City did not have a high school back then and used to bus the kids to Gunnison.
Houston: Well, when I started school, we had kindergarten thanks to my mother, and they had a high school. It went through grade 12 at that time, but in the mid to late 60s they switched that and they started to bus the high school students. And it was that time that my parents decided that we probably ought to go to a bigger school. I was transferred and we rented a house. I wasn't on the bus, so starting in seventh grade, I was a Gunnison student.
Palmisano: Explain how that worked. You moved to Gunnison in seventh grade, and then when did you come back to Lake City?
Houston: Well, my parents rented a house down there, so we just lived down there. But I'd always come back every weekend, so I always considered myself a Lakecitian. Although the education that I received in Gunnison was excellent.
Palmisano: Where did you go to college
Houston: In Gunnison. I stayed fairly close. And Western State College at that time.
Palmisano: What did you study there?
Houston: English and history.
Palmisano: Now, as I recall you telling me you were the editor of your high school newspaper. Talk about your love for journalism and how it started back then.
Houston: Even as a kid, I enjoyed putting words together that would tell a story or that would share an insight into character. And my first published work was at the Lake City School. We had a mimeographed once a month newsletter called the Slumgullion Gazette. And my first published work was in fifth grade when I described what it was like to be home ill and how fun it was to get back to school again. So my very first article, fifth grade, which I hate to admit is over 60 years ago now.
Palmisano: Talk about how your career in journalism evolved into high school and afterward.
Houston: And I liked being a nosy reporter. So in high school I joined La Remuda was the name of our high school paper in Gunnison, and that came out once a month. And I was a reporter for that and served as editor just prior to my graduation in 1973.
Palmisano: What were some highlights for you as a high school reporter?
Houston: As a reporter, you realize the importance of stepping lightly on certain topics and the value of not losing all of your contacts. I can remember, I was never a sports reporter per se. I was the editor of the high school paper. And it was a heck of a lot of work to get that out even once a month. That would be the old cold cut and paste version that we were doing at that point. I can remember my friend Jeff was the sports reporter, and he unfortunately predicted that our local team, the Cowboys, was going to lose in a football game. The coach didn't take very kindly to that, Laura, and had him stand in the center of the gymnasium at an all school event and literally eat the words that he had written from the paper. He had to chew it down. And I think all this has been educational for me on what to do and what not to do in hometown journalism. And oddly enough, Laura. So he ate his prediction that we were going to lose. And we did lose that particular game. But I can still remember, and Jeff was a good sport about this, that he got in front of the whole school to do that.
Palmisano: That's pretty extreme.
Houston: It is. I don't think you could probably get away with that today.
Palmisano: No, that would be child abuse.
Houston: But see the education value of what you do and don't do as a journalist.
Palmisano: After graduation, you went to Western in Gunnison. You studied English, you studied history. Were you involved with the university newspaper?
Houston: Yes. And then I got involved as a reporter on the Top of the World. And that would be in 1974. They named me as the school's youngest editor at that time. They plucked me out and said, okay, you can be the editor of the Top of the World, which was a weekly paper. Again, cold paste. I never did linotype. You know, where you'd have hot lead. That was individual letters that would be sent. This was the more modern era where everything was cold paste. It was computer generated.
Palmisano: For our listeners who are not familiar, what is cold paste?
Houston: As adversed to hot lead, which wasn't very healthy to breathe. I can't say that I had any experience with that, but that traditionally is how you do newspapers. Cold it would be copy. You would take in a typed story. A typesetter would type it. It would show up magically in print. You would wax the back of that and paste it into columns. You'd also paste separate the headlines. So cold paste. And an entirely different and slightly more complicated way of reproducing photographs as well.
Palmisano: What were some of the highlights for you as a reporter in college?
Houston: Again, the importance of having contacts both in the administration, in the sports department. I made friends with the coaches and you can see that was based on my experience with the coaches in high school. I never had to eat a prediction that we had done in our newspaper. We covered riots. And at this point it was the start of streaking, where people got into streaking across the campus or through classrooms. And so that was one of the things we covered was the phenomena of wanting to disrobe and streak across campus. There were military protests and those were interesting to cover. There was history. I've always liked history. As you can see. So we delved into the history of the campus and how it had gradually evolved in the 70s. That would be right. Yeah. We have the largest collegiate letter and it's on Tenderfoot Mountain. You can still see it. At that time at homecoming, they would ignite it with gasoline and there would be a flaming W on the side of the hill and that out during my tenure as editor. Because look at the environmental issues on that.
Palmisano: What do you think was the most important story you covered in your early career, whether it was high school or college?
Houston: Probably war protests and the draft.
Palmisano: That was for Vietnam?
Houston: Yeah, Even in high school, Vietnam had just ended, but the draft was still on. So on college campuses, that was a big thing theme for us.
Palmisano: What happened after you graduated college?
Houston: Left college at this point. I spent a year in England. I was enrolled in the University of Bath, where I was involved in literature, not in reporting at that point. It was so brief in England, but I developed a lifelong love of England at that point. And I've returned often in the years since then, then came back to Lake City. I had no particular career plan, but from history I knew we used to have a literature and feature oriented quarterly magazine called the San Cristobal Quarterly. And it was last published in 1901 in Lake City. So I restarted that in 1977, and that was rather short lived. I didn't follow that through, but I put out a number of issues at the San Cristobal Quarterly.
Palmisano: When did you restart the Lake City Silver World?
Houston: So the Silver World hadn't been published since 1938, and that was a weekly paper. And after my experience in Gunnison with the Top of the World, I figured I could do a weekly paper with dedicated staff and with dedicated advertisers and subscribers. So the Silver World was resurrected for the first time since 1938 in May of 1978. And so that's about 47 years ago now.
Palmisano: Why did you restart that paper?
Houston: I've always been fascinated with leaving a written record of a community, how it develops and the characters that you deal with in these towns. And we all know from personal experience how fast this turnover is. So I think a newspaper is a good way to preserve that.
If you're interested in personalities, if you're interested in businesses that may not be there the next year or not there the next 10 years, I think it's important to chronicle that they did exist and why they were important to that community. And I think I've accomplished that. I've followed generations that are now long gone, that are forgotten, other than if you look in back issues of that newspaper.
Palmisano: What was it like in the early days of the Silver World for you?
Houston: Fairly rudimentary. I've started in my same office that I'm still in today, although it's expanded. And it consisted of a checkbook in which there was never enough money, a Pentax camera, a manual typewriter, a chair and a sheet of paper. And you would type out volumes of paper on a typewriter, compile those stories, think of your headline, then hotfoot it to Gunnison on a given day each week where you'd hand it to the typesetter and it would magically be transformed into written stories. You'd lay it out, you'd come up with the headlines, you'd cut and paste in the pictures, and when you were satisfied, you'd proof it, you'd send it to the back where it would be again transformed onto metal plates that were put on the press and it would be printed. And then you would have somebody that would put labels with the addresses of your subscribers. You'd bundle those up, put them into mailbags, come back to Lake City. This was a full day. You'd get down there at eight [in the morning] and I'd get back home probably at eight in the evening, and then mail it the next day from Lake City and also distribute it. When I started the paper, I had a couple boys that were age 10 and 12 who had a newspaper route on their bicycles and they would deliver the local papers. That only lasted a year or two, and then we went purely to the mail, other than over the counter at businesses.
Palmisano: Were you running the paper by yourself other than your two paper boys?
Houston: No, I had good staff at that point. Someone who would be in charge of advertising. I did most of the photography and the writing, but I had always counted on someone for advertising and office administration, answering the phones, dealing with the public, that was something I always hired out. And I've had very good dedicated staff through the years.
Palmisano: But mainly you've been the editor and sole reporter.
Houston: Yeah, I hired a couple reporters through the years.
Palmisano: But, just mainly Grant Houston.
Houston: Yeah, mostly.
Palmisano: That's a lot of work.
Houston: Yeah, and it's a responsibility. The thing with running a weekly paper is you've got to stay inspired every week. You can't get yourself worn out and there's some weeks where you're overwhelmed with news and others where you're kind of scratching your head and saying, what's going to be the front page picture this week?
Palmisano: How did you stay inspired to keep this paper going for so long?
Houston: I was just dedicated to it and I had experience from both high school and college. As far as the commitment, once you say you're going to run a weekly paper, it's never been a huge moneymaker, but it's kind of been self-sufficient through the years.
Palmisano: Let's talk about some of the biggest stories you've covered in your time at the Silver World.
Houston: Okay. Biggest that I can think of. There's been some dramatic and it's a learning experience. Even after 40 years, I'm still learning. There's different sorts of stories. I enjoy features and I enjoy delving into personalities and what makes people tick. There's other things that just land on your doorstep that you're obliged as a newspaper to cover. There's been murders. There's been bad stuff that you. You can't turn your blind eye to that. One of the biggest stories that I covered was when our sheriff was killed. He was shot by two outlaws at the base of Slumgullion Pass. That was Sheriff Coursey, and that would have been in 1994. So the sheriff was killed. They searched for the perpetrators and they later found that it had been a murder suicide. But it was interesting as a newspaper to try to write stories that told how nervous the community was. You'd had a sheriff who was murdered and he was well loved and you had two outlaws that we didn't know where they were. They had SWAT teams that went house to house and searched my house was searched. They looked under beds, they looked in closets. So it was interesting as a journalist to report on that uncertainty that pervaded in the air and the sense of relief when it was found out that they were no longer a menace, those people. That would be one of the biggest stories in anyone's career.
Houston: Probably the other is that in history we know that Alfred Packer was a prospector here in 1874 that killed and supposedly ate his companions. And he was the sole survivor out of that group of prospectors. So in 1989, we had a crew of forensic experts and archaeologists come to Lake City and unearth the remains of those victims. They found skulls in which there were axe and knife marks into the skulls. They had long scrapes on the arms and legs where the skin was systematically removed. It wasn't like teeth marks or anything like that. But there was scrape marks showing what had happened to those people after they were dead. They analyzed the hands and realized that there were blanket fibers embedded in the skulls, that they had had their blankets over their heads when they were struck with a fatal blow of an axe or a knife. Fascinating stuff. And see, that fits in with my interest in history, Laura. So those would be my two big stories that I can think of automatically. Forest fires, floods. We've covered it all through the years.
Palmisano: Do you have a favorite story?
Houston: Probably Packer. People were fascinated with that. It was so appealing to the reader that we did a special issue on that.
Palmisano: You've run the Lake City Silver World for over four decades. What are you looking forward to doing next with it?
Houston: The editor that ran the paper the longest was Billy Blair and he ran the old Silver World until it went out of business in 1938. So by my calculations from 1978 until today, 2025, I've now been running the paper longer than anyone in the history of journalism in Lake City. And again, I had experience in high school and college on this sort of responsibility. And that's a concern that I'm awake at night sometimes worrying how does the paper continue and look at the society changes we've had in 47 years: the internet. Now there's few articles that I can get in that paper that haven't already been discussed to some degree on the Internet. So that's a bit of a challenge. How a newspaper can provide perhaps a different, more accurate slice of what is happening? And again the posterity. And hopefully that's something that's going to be preserved in a hundred years, Laura, you're going to be able to look back and see the newsprint.
Palmisano: Are you wanting to retire?
Houston: I would consider it. And obviously we've all got a checkout date, Laura, so that's a big worry is I'd like to see this paper continue.
Palmisano: Is the paper for sale?
Houston: I wouldn't just pick anybody now, Laura. If you were interested, I'd jump at that. But the majority of people I'm pretty picky on. The big thing is that commitment. Sure it's fun to do it one week, but then you wake up on Monday the next week and oh gosh, I've got to do this again. That's the commitment and I would be interested that whoever takes it over for me has the same commitment to Lake City to fairly report the news, that you're not just one sided on this sort of thing.
Palmisano: So you're looking to pass it on to the right person at the right time. And what does that look like to you? Is that going to be five years, ten years? What are you hoping happens?
Houston: Oh, I still enjoy what I do. There's no immediate urge on this, but at 70, which I turned 70 this year, I realized I've got to have a successor sooner or later. And there are other things I'd probably like to do as well.
Palmisano: What are those things?
Houston: Well, in addition to the newspaper, I was the co-founder of the Historical Society and that was in 1973. And that organization was responsible for Lake City's museum. That we have a Hinsdale County museum today. Again, preserving for posterity the fabric of who we are today or in the past. So I've always had a love for the history and preserving the artifacts.
Palmisano: Why do you think journalism is important on a small town level like this?
Houston: Well, I think you're preserving the day to day life of the community that I don't see that you're preserved on the internet, at least I'm not aware of that. A paper on a weekly basis, you've got a microscope and you've analyzed what's happened in the past week and you've kind of prioritized what was important and you're looking ahead to what's coming the next week and [that's what's ] hopefully we're preserving. And again, as I've said, especially the personalities that make this place unique.
Palmisano: In your opinion, what makes Lake City unique?
Houston: Independence. And you're not exactly in a city here. You've got to be fairly independent to live here. And I think that draws some particular characters that continue to fascinate me, whether it was 1978 or 2024. The characters that are attracted to Lake City, that's worthy of preserving through feature articles.
Palmisano: Also tell us about your office. It's in unique historical space.
Houston: It's in a building upstairs over the bank. And when I started this, the newspaper I located in the exact same location. The bank has always been very supportive. It wasn't a bank at that time. It was a variety of businesses, a restaurant and a woodworking shop at that time. And in the early 80s that would be another big story, that we got our first bank in the early 1980s. We hadn't had one since 1914. So you can see the gradual revival that was going on. And we were on that wave with the newspaper. It was a good time for to restart a paper. The bank, at any rate, was my landlord and continues to be my landlord. There's a flight of stairs, as we all know, to get up here and fairly confined space, even with the expansion that I did about 25 years ago. But it's a good location and it's fun to be able to look out the window and you're right downtown to see what's going on.
Palmisano: What does your staff look like today?
Houston: Very dedicated. That's what I look for in any staff, is that they are energized to come back the next Monday. There's a sense of a relief and satisfaction I can't quite explain. When you start on a Monday and your end product is a printed paper on a Friday, there's a sense of satisfaction that you can see the fruits of your work. And I like to see that in my staff as well. They've got to appreciate that we're starting with nothing on Monday and yet magically, by Friday we've got a paper we're holding in our hands. And we also have an online version as well. We have subscribers that get both the hard copy and the electronic.
Palmisano: Let's talk about staffing levels. It's you as the editor, you as the main reporter. I believe you have administrative assistant. Do you have freelancers? Does anyone else that help out?
Houston: There are some good reporters that we hire on an hourly basis and we would send them out if there was a new business or things that were a little bit over what the editor has time for. Also, the office manager also collects the ads, lays out the ads, collects the subscribers, make sure that the labels are ready for Friday and that it gets mailed out. So there's a variety of office duties. Again, I rely on a good staff for that.
Palmisano: What does your staff look like? It's yourself and your office manager, right?
Houston: Two of us that are full time right now, and a couple depending on the available talent, a couple stringer reporters.
Palmisano: How many subscribers do you have?
Houston: I think we've probably got about 1,400 between online and hard copy.
Palmisano: And you get people who come here in the summertime who subscribe. You get people who used to live in Lake City and have left that subscribe. What do you think this paper means for them?
Houston: Well, it's a connection, but again, it's a challenge because those same people, the majority of our subscribers are in Texas and Oklahoma. I think there is more subscribers in those two states than there are in Colorado. Again, your challenge is that there are online options. So we like to make our paper as intriguing and factual as possible so that they'll subscribe as well. Because again, I think we're giving a more well rounded version of what's going on.
Palmisano: How is your local support good?
Houston: Local support's always been good. Advertising comes and goes. It's good in the summer, as you could realize in a summer community. Interesting that we have new winter activities that are going on, so we see a slight increase in advertising. The other thing that was important with the paper was when we were named the official newspaper for legals, and we've held that since 1979. So that means both the town of Lake City and Hinsdale County run their legals, which would be bills payable or if a particular meeting was coming up, that you had to give notice. As a legal newspaper, they're obliged to print with us.
Palmisano: Thank you for your time, Grant.
Houston: Hey, thank you, Laura. You've been very good.
