4th Generation Owner

Motto: A daily history of Allen County since 1897.

Our Philosophy: A newspaper builds a community by supporting its schools, city and county governments and the organizations that are dedicated to improving the civic and cultural environment, such as Iola Industries, Inc., Friends of the Bowlus, endowments of Allen County Community College, Iola Schools and other similar citizen associations working for the benefit of all.

The Register also seeks to strengthen the area it serves by giving accurate and complete reports on local events, calling attention to the special accomplishments of its citizens, young and old, rich and poor, and serving as a forum for the discussion of civic issues. When controversies arise our philosophy requires us to report them as fully and as accurately as possible, without sensationalism or opinions.

The Register's editor's opinions are expressed on the editorial page and are always labeled and signed if they appear elsewhere. The purposes of Register editorials are sometimes to inform, sometimes to reflect on the human and natural scene, sometimes to persuade but never to dictate. The Register's pages are always open to civil discussion of public events from its readers and it is the obligation of each of us, regardless of our position on the Register staff, to answer causal critics with an invitation to express their own views in a letter to The Forum.

The Register can only accomplish its mission if the community trusts it to be fair and reliable. Our reputation for integrity and tolerance is our most precious asset. Each of us should make it a personal goal to strengthen that reputation by the way we do our jobs and the way we interact with others in the community.

Since Charles F. Scott bought the Register in 1882, this newspaper has been considered a leader in journalism and a force for progress in the state. We should all be proud of its reputation and determined to add to its luster.

Charles F. Scott became publisher of the Register in 1882 at the age of 22, just a year after he graduated from the University of Kansas. His partners in the weekly were his brother, Angelo, and E.E. Rohrer. He bought their shares over the next three years.

After experimenting with a newspaper in Lawrence and as the Washington, D.C. correspondent of the Topeka Capital-Commonwealth, Scott returned to Iola to stay until his death in 1938.

Scott earned a statewide reputation as an editorial writer and fervent Republican. He was appointed a regent of the University of Kansas and was elected to the Kansas state Senate in the 1890s. He made the Register a daily newspaper in 1897 when Iola was growing by leaps and bounds in the gas boom and zinc smelter days. His political ambitions took him to Congress in 1900 and he served five terms. He later ran unsuccessfully for governor. His ability as a public speaker won him employment on the Chautauqua circuit and as a representative of the Republican Party in the states west of the Mississippi on election years.

He and his wife, May, had four children, Ewing, Angelo, Charles, Jr. and Ruth.

Angelo C. Scott succeeded his father as editor and publisher in 1938. He had been working at the newspaper since his graduation from KU in 1921, serving, in turn, as reporter, columnist and business manager.

Angelo was well established as an essayist by the time he became publisher and quickly became recognized as a player in state politics. He won the William Allen White distinguished editor award in 1958 and was the first chairman of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board of Review, a job he held from 1949 to 1957. As such he was personally involved with the transition period as Kansas moved from its bone-dry laws to state-controlled sales of alcoholic beverages by licensed private businesses.

He was president of both the State and Allen County Historical Societies and the Kansas Press Association. He also served as a member of the board of the Inland Press Association, which had a nationwide membership. During World War II he was chairman of the War Price and Rationing board in Allen County and served on the Kansas Joint Merit System Council from 1944 to 1949. He contracted rheumatic fever as a child and the disease weakened his heart and made it susceptible to infections. While both of his brothers served in the war, he was classified 4-F. His weak heart limited his physical activities as he grew older but he rarely missed a day at the Register until he sold it to his nephew, Emerson E. Lynn, jr., in the fall of 1965. He died May 30, 1968 of heart failure at the age of 68.

Emerson Lynn, Jr. grew up working as a Register carrier. His father was city editor and his mother later became wire editor. While he and his family spent four years away from Iola while his father recuperated from pneumonia and tried to earn a living in California during the Great Depression, Iola was always home. He graduated from Iola High School in 1942 and left Allen County Junior College in February, 1943, to join the U.S. Army Air Force.

He was discharged at war’s end in 1946 and spent a few months as a Register reporter before entering the University of Chicago. While at Chicago he won a Rotary International Scholarship to study at Melbourne University in Australia. He and Mickey Killough were married in Melbourne in 1950 and returned to the United States that year to start a family and begin a newspaper career.

He worked for the former Wichita Beacon as farm editor for about a year and then moved to Humboldt to become editor of the Humboldt Union, a weekly newspaper. Three sons and a daughter were born before the family packed up and moved to Bowie, Texas to publish the Bowie News.

They said goodbye to Bowie in 1965 when his uncle Angelo decided to retire.

Emerson has been active in the Kansas Press Association and the William Allen White Foundation at KU and served as president of each. He won the first Clyde Reed editor’s award and the first KPA mentor award. He was a panelist on the public television show, Kansas Week at KPTS in Wichita about once a month for 10 years. In Iola he served for many years as Chairman of the Board of Iola Industries, Inc., on the Iola Public Library Board and the Allen County Hospital board. He was president of Mid America, Inc. for two years.

In 2001, Emerson and Mickey were overjoyed to discover that their daughter, Susan, would buy the Register from them and allow Emerson to continue writing editorials from an upstairs office if he would agree not to meddle. Both have kept their promises.

Susan Lynn returned to Iola in 2000 to test the waters of a newspaper career. In 2001, she agreed to sign the line and become the fourth generation at the Register’s helm.

Besides the seven-year stint in Bowie, Texas, Susan’s youth was spent in Iola, graduating from Iola High School in 1974. She attended the University of Kansas, studied abroad in England and was graduated from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington with a liberal arts degree in 1979. She earned a master’s in library science from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich. She worked as a reference librarian at the public library in Holland, Mich., where she and her three children lived for 15 years prior to moving to Kansas. Prior to that she had lived in Jefferson City, Mo., Shawnee, Okla., and Glenwood Springs, Colo., following the newspaper career of her first husband.

She currently serves as co-chairman of the Kansas Newspaper Foundation, as a commissioner on the Bowlus Fine Arts Center Commission and on the Allen County Community College Foundation.

Two of her three brothers, Emerson K. Lynn and Angelo Lynn, are newspaper publishers in Vermont. Michael Lynn serves in the ministry in New Haven, Conn.

Susan is married to Dr. Brian Wolfe.