Robert Quillen

Verni Robert Quillen was a Kansas-born newspaperman who spent more than a quarter century in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, editing the tiny Fountain Inn Tribune while quietly becoming one of the most widely syndicated humorists in America. By 1932 his editorials, paragraphs, cartoons and one-liners were running in four hundred newspapers across the United States, Canada, England and the Far East, and a biographer called him the best “paragrapher” of his day. He was a genuine eccentric — he erected a monument in his yard to Eve, the first woman, published his own obituary sixteen years before he died, and built himself a small Greek temple to write in that he never once used.