NEDERLAND — It is impossible to tell what will grow out of a garden of ideas, but what is planted is sure to flourish so long as it comes from listening to the needs of the community. 

In this analogy, Kay Turnbaugh is a master gardener and cultivator of thought and mountain culture, as the books she has written—from a historic recounting of three “boom and bust” cycles of local mining in "Around Nederland," to the wild but true stories of Goldie Griffith in the award-winning "The Last of the Wild West Showgirls"—have sprouted and spread inspiration and enorous respect. 

But not even Turnbaugh knew that a small, printed movie schedule for her “movie night” events would end up growing into a 50-year local legacy. 

“There was a group of us artist types who decided to start the Nederland Center for Arts and Humanities; we had classes, art shows, a big fair in the summer—we closed down First Street. We did all kinds of things, and one of the things that we started doing was showing movies.” Turnbaugh began retelling the origins of The Mountain-Ear, the newspaper she created and owned for 27 years.  

“People brought their own chairs, we’d make popcorn, they could brown bag it if they wanted to, as long as they didn’t get too rowdy. And then our ancient projector broke, and we couldn’t get it fixed.”

Having begun in the bottom floor of what is now known as The Rustic Moose, Turnbaugh’s community movie operation had to move to the elementary school auditorium—now the Nederland Community Center—and start over with some new used equipment. 

“In order to get the word out, we started to send a movie schedule to all the [mail]box holders. Then things got too expensive, so I went around and asked a couple of businesses if they would put an ad in, and then a couple of them said, ‘I’ll put an ad in if you put a little news in.’” 

And just like that, Nederland had a newspaper. 

With an English teacher for a mother, two years of journalism courses at CU in her résumé, and hands-on experience working on the newsletter for CU’s Ski Club, Turnbaugh went right into doing the writing, editing, ad sales, and design layout for the mighty four-pager that was The Mountain-Ear. 

“I eventually got a loan to get an IBM Selectric typewriter. We rented a little office space and bounced around all over town,” Turnbaugh reminisced, describing how the newspaper grew little by little in the early years, starting from just four pages and ending up at 12 – 16 on a big news week.

A lot of the paper’s steady growth came from a growing team of journalists who started writing stories that mattered to the community, as well as the generosity of others, and from Turnbaugh’s openness and willingness to learn. 

“I got signed up with a program at CU to get work study students, and the first student I had had worked at the Durango paper, so she taught me all kinds of stuff. 

“A lot of people were very generous; my mother taught high school and her school was throwing out an enlarger, so she salvaged it for me. Then, when the Free Press went out of business, they had this huge warehouse with all of their ancient equipment and they were selling it all off, so I got this machine that could print headlines.” 

Turnbaugh explained how, up to that point, she was creating headlines using the letterpress style, one press-on letter at a time. As The Mountain-Ear evolved, so did the technology. Through grants, loans, and a little luck, Turnbaugh was able to keep up with the times and purchase those big, new, and expensive essentials, from a typesetting machine to a network of Macintosh computers loaded with the PageMaker software.

But even with a state-of-the-art printer, she still needed to take her product to the printing press.  

“They would take down and print the photos; mark crop lines and figure out if they needed to be enlarged to fit the frame; and they would make halftones,” Turnbaugh detailed. “I would stay there until two, three in the morning and cut out the halftones and place them on the pages, and then they would take all of that and run it through their whole process to start printing, and so a lot of the time I’d be there all night.” 

Printing wasn’t the only process that evolved with new technology over time. During her tenure, Turnbaugh also oversaw the distribution process by keeping a list of subscribers and their addresses which over time grew to 3,000. 

When Turnbaugh learned that she could use a Personal Computer—a new concept that she knew little about—to streamline The Mountain Ear’s distribution process, she quickly got one and began to tinker. But there was one issue that she just could not figure out: how to turn the thing off. 

It never occurred to her that she would have to press “Start” in order to shut the computer down.  

“For crying out loud,” Turnbaugh laughs, “who thought that was a good idea?”  

After a decade of working 40-plus hours a week on top of producing The Mountain-Ear, Turnbaugh was finally able to leave her full-time job and commit fully to the newspaper. She and her team built up what was once laughed at by the former head of the Colorado Press Association into a powerful underdog that Front Range publications had to pay attention to. 

“The biggest award we ever won was for community service,” Turnbaugh noted as she began telling the story of how the small mountain newspaper put a spotlight on a failing elementary school. “This is when we had an actual reporter—it was Barbara Lawlor—and she was taking her kids to register for school and she came back and complained about all these problems with the school, so I said that I wanted to go up with her when she takes the kids for their first day.” 

What Turnbaugh uncovered was evidence of a broken system, made glaringly clear by the school forcing kids to “share” desks, by one sitting at the desk and the other sitting underneath, and then changing shifts mid-day. 

The pictures and the release of the story rattled some nerves with the school’s principal and teachers. 

“They said we were causing problems and nothing good was going to come of it," Turnbaugh said. "But we got a new elementary school, so it turned out okay.” 

The Mountain-Ear “newsroom” would meet every Monday morning to talk about the news around Nederland and determine what were the most important stories that residents wanted or needed to know. Just as in the case of the elementary school story, sometimes that determination would lead to something big.  

“I had someone leave me some information ‘in a phone booth’ that indicated he had gone bankrupt,” Turnbaugh said, talking about an elusive potential buyer of the Eldora ski area who did not allow interviews and was surrounded by bodyguards.

“My reporter at the time, Kate Readio, and I started tracking it down. We spent days driving from courthouse to courthouse in Denver, trying to find where this had happened. We did eventually find the records, and then we started to find more, and it just blossomed into this really big story.” 

Sometimes big stories come with blowback from an institution or business, or from local residents. Turnbaugh explained how emotions can boil over in public and she, her team, or The Mountain-Ear itself would come under attack, once in the form of a threat of violence at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, or another time by full beer bottles being thrown through the windows of the newspaper office. 

Despite these rare instances, Turnbaugh believes wholeheartedly that empathic listening and ensuring everyone feels represented and heard is the key to success, not just in a journalistic sense, but in our interpersonal relationships. 

“I’d talk with them when they came in; sometimes we’d write a whole story on what they thought, or on what they thought we hadn’t done,” Turnbaugh said. “Basically, just listen to them and try to make sure they feel heard and that they feel like we represented them as much as we represented everybody else.

"Because, for the most part, we could talk, and it usually enhanced our understanding of what was going on, because it’s never just one-way.”