Robert Quillen - Fountain Inn Tribune

Fountain Inn Tribune

In 1910, when his brother-in-law in Fountain Inn offered to sell him a weekly advertising sheet called News and Notions, Quillen bought it and borrowed money to purchase his own press and type. In the following year Quillen began editing and publishing the newly christened Fountain Inn Tribune, "a well-organized publication overflowing with news of Fountain Inn and outlying communities."

At first, as Quillen confessed two decades later, "the natives were a little hot under the collar" at what he called his "hypothetical cases"—thinly veiled descriptions of the locals—but most soon warmed to him like an eccentric aunt. One Fountain Inn man warned a new preacher, "Don't get mad at anything Mr. Quillen says. We're used to him and just overlook his queerness." Among other oddities, Quillen regularly wore a "cowboy-type Stetson," raised a memorial to "Eve, the First Woman," published his father's obituary before he died, used a column to advertise his interest in adopting a baby boy ("must be between three and twelve months of age"), and built himself a faux Greek temple as a work space—which he never used.

Well into his forties, Quillen hoped to become a great novelist. Macmillan published his two novels, One Man's Religion (1923) and The Path Wharton Found (1924). The first was "little more than a loose collection of pieces first published in the Saturday Evening Post," the second, a book which one reviewer called a "good enough conventional story, hampered by neither originality nor brilliancy." A decade later Quillen referred to these books as "fortunately out of print."

Meanwhile, Quillen engaged in a "never ending struggle" to make the Fountain Inn Tribune pay its own way. With fewer than a thousand subscribers, the newspaper itself was probably never profitable, but Quillen used the ideas generated in Fountain Inn as the basis for pieces that appeared in scores of leading national magazines and newspapers. Twice, frustrated with the time it took to run the weekly, he sold the paper (notoriously in 1926 for one dollar) and twice bought it back. In 1929, Quillen called the Tribune "my hobby—my substitute for golf."