Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas William Atlee Sears Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

WILLIAM ATLEE SEARS

(Transcribed by Peg Luce)

William Atlee Sears who is serving his fifteenth year as editor of the Leon News, a weekly newspaper at Leon, Kansas, is also serving his second year of his first term as mayor of that city. He is one of the state’s most progressive and popular editors of a weekly newspaper.

Mr. Sears’ early home was in Illinois where he was born on September 30, 1873, near Golden, on a farm. His parents were Abner Hunt and Laura Strickler Sears, both of whom have passed on. The father died on June 30, 1915, at Cheney, Kansas, and the mother, February 24, 1934, at the home of her son in Leon.

Mr. Sears just “happened” into the newspaper business but has prospered every step of the way.

When he was a small boy, back in the Golden, Illinois, he sat beside another little boy in Sunday School, little dreaming that his class pal was to influence his entire career. Fifteen years later he was in Clayton, Illinois, and there again met the boy of the Sunday School who in the meantime had learned to be a printer and who persuaded Mr. Sears to become his partner – putting up the money for the plant.

Mr. Sears did not know nonpareil type from pica, but decided to take a chance. They bought the small outfit, then being used to publish the Liberty Bell, at Liberty, Ill. At the end of three months, he bought his partner’s interest and moved the plant to Quincy, Ill., where he opened a job shop and where he was destined, in 1897 – to wed Miss Nevva Glines who sometimes assists in the News office. Three sons were born to this union: Howard, who died at two years of age; Hazen, who lives in Paola; and Lewis, who is attending Kansas State Teachers College, at Pittsburg.

Mr. and Mrs. Sears moved to a farm near Cheney in 1900, and in 1912 moved to a farm in Butler County, southeast of Leon, just in time for the dry year, 1913. As he toiled on the farm, Mr. Sears often felt the urge to get back into newspaper work. In the fall of 1919, he bought from Lyle Larrick for $275 the remnants of what had once been a newspaper shop in Leon, but which had stood idle for a year or more.

Since that time Mr. Sears has built his paper from a five-column hand-set paper printed on a job press, to a six-column, machine-set weekly, printed on a larger press.

For several years Mr. Sears was in partnership with his son, Hazen, in drilling water wells, still keeping up his active work as a printer.

In 1933, Mr. Sears was elected as mayor of Leon, and is still serving. He is a member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass., and also of the branch church, First Church of Christ, Scientist in Wichita. His hobby is horticulture.