Giving that caught on

Thursday, Dec. 21, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.

Some customers at the Pioneer bar in Goodsprings are once again trying to prove that they're not a bunch of scoundrels and curmudgeons.

As they have since 1998, they've raised funds to buy gifts for about 30 child patients at Montevista Hospital who are mentally ill or have behavioral problems.

They do it without fanfare. And because of the hospital's strict privacy rules, they aren't even allowed to meet their young beneficiaries.

"These bar patrons are our angels," said Ryan Kulczynski, recreational therapist at the hospital, which serves mentally ill adults and children of Southern Nevada.

The bar customers, who have banded together as a loose-knit club, say that no matter what people call them at other times during the year, they get tremendous satisfaction brightening the lives of children who otherwise would have little on Christmas Day.

There are two accountings of how this group of Goodsprings do-gooders got its start. One version has a town father warning visitors not to go to the Pioneer - the only business left in the Southern Nevada mining boomtown of the early 20th century - because a bunch of no-goods hung out there.

When word got back to the bar's patrons, they passed around a hat, collected money and used the funds to buy Christmas toys for underprivileged kids to show town officials they really were a nice bunch of barflies.

Pioneer bartender Karen Cobb shrugs off that version as so much folklore.

In reality, she said, a Pioneer barkeep dealt with a particularly gruff customer by creating a club with a particularly unflattering name beginning with the letter "A," and then issuing him the first membership card.

The patron, former Goodsprings resident Russ Coggins, took it as a badge of honor and started showing the card to everyone. Other customers said they wanted to join his club. By week's end there were 30 members.

"We charged each one of them $5 and used the money to help the kids at Montevista," said Cobb, now the acting president of the club. "It has just caught on."

In recent years, bar visitors from as far away as Japan and England have joined. Today, the club boasts about 4,600 card-carrying members worldwide.

Each year, a week before Christmas, Cobb drives her pickup truck filled with $400 to $500 worth of toys to the Southwest Las Vegas hospital to make Christmas brighter for kids who have had it rough in life.

"What these people do means a lot to us," Kulczynski said, noting that before the bar patrons came along, Montevista employees shouldered almost the entire burden of buying Christmas gifts for the child patients.

"Without them, we could not meet all of the children's needs for a merry Christmas."