Losses continue at GateHouse Media, owner of daily newspapers near Fort Leonard Wood

The bad news continues at GateHouse Media, owners of the Waynesville Daily Guide, Rolla Daily News, and Camdenton Lake Sun Leader near Fort Leonard Wood. However, things may be less bad than they've been in the past. GateHouse Media issued its first-quarter financial report yesterday with a press release. Key take-away points from the official press release include that GateHouse continued to lose money, though not as much as in the past. Reported net loss for the first quarter was $17.5 million compared to a net loss in last year's first quarter of $31.9 million. For those who don't remember, GateHouse Media was kicked off the New York Stock Exchange, has been rated by various major investment firms as a likely bankruptcy candidate, and has lost virtually all of its shareholder value, declining from a share price in the low $20 range to about 3 cents per share, and is currently trading in the range of 10 to 30 cents per share. As of today, it's trading at 23 cents per share.

When I was at basic training at FT.L.W. back in the early 1970’s we use to buy the Chicago Tribune at the mess hall. The tribunes would be trucked down from Chicago and we had them in our hands by 6:00 pm. I wasn't ashamed to purchase the Tribune back in those days as it was still a conservative newspaper. We weren't even allowed to leave base and go to Waynesville. The town was pretty much declared off-limits by the base commanding General.

Depending on the year, there may have been very good reasons to make much of the off-post community off-limits to soldiers.

Waynesville and St. Robert, as well as Pulaski County in general, have changed dramatically in the last two decades. Lots of people remember this as a World War II engineer replacement post that then became an engineer basic training installation during Korea and Vietnam. In more recent years, the entire Army Engineer School (including officer training) has been moved here, along with the Military Police School and Chemical School when Fort McClellan closed.

Any idea what that means about the role of Fort Leonard Wood in finding IEDs, training truck drivers for convoys, training mine detection dogs, training military police to guard Guantanamo and fix the mess at Abu Ghraib, and coordinating the hunt for weapons of mass destruction? Fort Leonard Wood plays a key role in the current war on terror, and the main reason that isn’t better known is the post’s fairly isolated location in the middle of the Ozarks

In other words, this is no longer a basic training installation where young Vietnam-era draftees who typically didn’t want to be here went off-post to “blow off steam,” and attracted the sorts of businesses that catered to that.

I’d be lying if I said there aren’t still problems here. I’m a reporter and I deal with awful stuff every day. But it is dramatically different from the way things were when my father was at Fort Leonard Wood during what can justly be described as “the bad old days.”

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