Columnist Susan Snyder: Couple take a shine to Goldfield

Monday, May 2, 2005 | 8:09 a.m.

Dave Stowell plays a game with travelers who stop to look at the Goldfield Hotel.

"So, you want to buy my hotel?" he asks anyone peering through the dusty windows of the 97-year-old structure.

Then, he laughs. Stowell doesn't own the hotel. Red Roberts, a Northern Nevada rancher, bought it at public auction for $360,000 in 2003. At the time Roberts said he hoped to refurbish and reopen it.

But the hotel doesn't look any different now than it did then, said Stowell, who was enjoying his daily walk with his wife, Dorothy. The couple have lived in Goldfield for 29 years.

They examined a gold remembrance card that was stuck into the windowsill of a front pane. It read, "Forever yours. Good will be remembered as a blessing. Proverbs, 10:7."

"This place has touched a lot of people," Dorothy said.

But, only those who stop. Most people drive right on through Goldfield on U.S. 95, slowing only to abide by the posted 25 mph speed limit. Troopers can be almost anywhere.

It's hard to believe anyone actually lives there. But about 400 people do, the Stowells said.

They moved here in 1976 when he retired from the military and from his job as a guard at San Quentin prison and she retired from her job with the city of San Francisco. They were just passing through on the way back from Las Vegas, Dorothy recalled, when they stopped and sat awhile on the hotel's steps.

Dave wondered whether there was any property for sale. They inquired at the county land office in Goldfield. One thing led to another and they purchased a century-old home off the main drag.

"I told him, 'You're not stranding me in some old house in the middle of nowhere,' " Dorothy recalled.

She gave him a year to make the house livable. If he could do that, she'd stay.

"He worked like a beaver. And he'd never done any of that kind of work before," she said, chuckling at the memory.

They eventually sold that house, bought more land and two years ago moved into a new home on a lot along U.S. 95 at the edge of town. It's a long drive to the nearest grocery -- Tonopah is closest at 26 miles. But it's not hard to stay busy, they said.

Dorothy started a Red Hat Society. It has 32 members, and arguments don't last long. In a place this small, it's hard to avoid anyone.

"It's quite a different group of people," she said of her neighbors. "And once you get involved in something, you're in it."

Dorothy worked as a U.S. Census taker in 1980. She thought it was just for Goldfield, but it was for all of Esmeralda County.

"It was scary, and it took forever," she said. "I put 3,000 miles on my car."

They read a lot, she said. And they acquire new hobbies. She's learned to create T-shirt art and quilt. He has learned to build almost anything.

"People ask, 'What do you do, here?' And it's anything you want, really," Dave said. "We're compatible still, that's the main thing."

Every day they walk the entire length of town -- about four miles.

"There's no such thing as a boring retirement," Dorothy said. "There's only boring people."