Tonopah is Home: Karmin Greber

Karmin Greber’s planned stop for the summer in Tonopah led to a stay of over three decades—one that has included countless acts of community service to the town of Tonopah.

The now former Northern Nye County Hospital District board member spent the last several years helping to rebuild the town’s health care infrastructure and doing other community services.

“It’s opportunities in rural Nevada, especially frontier communities like ours, do not just happen,” Greber said in an interview. “You have to go out and find them. You have to create them sometimes, and it takes a lot of work and attention to make those happen.”

The hospital board

That opportunity was brought to her by a friend that the commissioners were going to hold an election for the board that initially established in 2015.

Since 2016, when Greber was elected to her seat, she worked to help bring more health care options to a town that lost its hospital.

One of the accomplishments Greber remembers as being a step in the right direction was having the demographic assessed by a third party.

“Just to understand, no matter what we thought services needed to be, we needed someone credentialed to say these are what you can support, and this is what the community needs,” she said. “And the community got involved in that as well, so that was a milestone.”

She also said, “Having Renown here was an amazing stopgap, and it comforted people tremendously with the loss of our hospital and emergency department, which is of course the most critical point of need. When you take your family member to an emergency room, there’s a reason and it’s immediate. You have to have that care, so to have Renown here, and the security of having that telehealth and the staff, that was a tremendous step forward.”

REMSA also helped augment some of the services the board helped bring forward and helped to support Nye EMS, she said.

Greber sees the hospital rising again in the community one day.

“The board is right now in the process of a design-build competition for redeveloping the hospital campus,” she says. “The steps that had to be taken that the commissioners started with the environmental surveys at the facility. Then with all the evaluations having incrementally higher levels of care, to where right now, we have the urgent care plus in place, and their coming up on their anniversary, so that’s a little kind of an incubator for an emergency department.”

That service is now 24 hours.

“That’s a step forward,” Greber said. “But definitely, the hospital district is going to see that they develop.”

Other community service

Greber also gave her time toward other services to the community.

Greber helped support an organization named Community Chest, a nonprofit in Virginia City.

“I taught pre-school as a nonprofit, and saw that early childhood development is a big gap that needs to be filled, and again the opportunity was presented to me very incidentally, actually, and I went home, looked it up, and applied because we were going to lose the program,” she said.

“At the time, we had very limited early childhood education, and from that chance encounter, I was able to support that for a little over two years and just deeply enjoyed that. It tapped into my drive of assistance to my community; to help our families and give our kids a chance for a bright future and be part of the solution.”

About committing to something in Tonopah, Greber states, “One of the things you learn in Tonopah, I say in Tonopah because my whole adult life has been here, you learn that if you are asked to do something, and you are not willing to be the last man standing to see that it gets done, then you should say no.”

She added, “It’s okay to say no, but if you say yes, you have to realize, especially here, you could be the last man standing to see this across the finish line, so I thought that way with the pre-school — put 110% into it.”

In the rearview

Greber came to Tonopah from Oregon at 17 for a summer trip to the town before heading onto college on a music scholarship.

“This became my permanent detour,” she said. “I wound up just putting down roots. I had family here at the time and quickly integrated into the community, became active in my church. It just became a place that I was comfortable building a life.”

Over three decades later, Greber has raised five children and laid roots in her career in business education.

Five of Greber’s children have left Tonopah for school with one recently returning. The other four are currently spread around in Idaho, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

“My husband and I were able to broaden their horizons,” Greber said. “We both felt it was important to experience other cultures, other people, demographics, and regions. They enjoyed their college time, and they’re still out there.”

“I have been very content with my life in Tonopah—very impressed the individuals that I’ve been able to know and value,” Greber said. “There’s a depth of knowledge and experience here that is really to be cherished and appreciated; not just the stories of the old-timers, but some really astute professionals that have given their time and built their life, and family here. I appreciate them, and I have appreciated all of the people that I’ve grown to know and love in my community.”

Greber added that, “I hope that my family has been a positive force in our community. I raised my kids to be that way, to be a good neighbor, to be a good citizen. They were gifted with aptitude and good health, and I wanted them to be ready to embrace the people around you but also look around you at the world, and look at the differences in people and not look away, not shy away, be brave in who you are and be open to others and show them that grace and acceptance.”

This is the inaugural installation to the “Tonopah is Home” series by the Times-Bonanza and Pahrump Valley Times. One person is featured in the last edition of each month in the Times-Bonanza and the Times about their time in Tonopah and how and why Tonopah is Home.