Paul Victor Shearer was born in Columbus Junction, Iowa, in 1919, to B.H. and Maude Shearer. B.H. was the owner and publisher of The Columbus Gazette newspaper. Paul Shearer graduated from Columbus Junction High School in 1936. He attended the University of Iowa, where he received his B.A. in 1940 and his law degree in 1942.

In 1943, Shearer married Barbara Smith. He was a veteran of World War II. After his service Shearer and his wife lived in Washington, Iowa, from 1946 until his death in 1995. He was a lawyer with a practice in Washington, Iowa, and he was very active in local civic affairs. He was a member of the YMCA, District Boy Scouts, Masonic Lodge #107, American Legion, Rotary, and the Washington County, Iowa, and American Bar Associations.

Shearer was a member of the Board of Fellows of the University of Iowa School of Religion. He served as president of that Board in 1983 -- 1984. He was also very active in his local United Methodist Church. He taught Sunday school for fifty years. Shearer was a founding trustee of the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He served as a lay leader of the Iowa Conference of the United Methodist Church and was elected as a delegate to ten general conferences worldwide. He was a member of the committee that studied the question of a separate jurisdiction (the Central Jurisdiction) for African-American members of the Methodist Church. Shearer was an advocate for abolishing segregation in the church and was a member of the Iowa delegation that requested the first black bishop outside of the Central Jurisdiction.

In 1979, Paul Shearer took over as owner and publisher of The Columbus Gazette. He wrote a regular column for that paper that also appeared in the Washington Evening Journal. His column in The Columbus Gazette was entitled “ImPRESSions” and featured travel logs of trips taken by himself and his wife, Barbara. Shearer wrote of trips in Iowa, Missouri, the southwestern United States, and Haiti.

Shearer and his wife, Barbara had two children, a son, Mark, and a daughter, Jane. Paul V. Shearer died on April 5, 1995, after an extended battle with cancer.