Members of the Emporia Alumni Club raked leaves at the Red Rocks State Historic Site, the legendary home of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Famous Phi, William Allen White. The club conducted this annual service to the site to place-hold for a new Kansas Epsilon Colony to be formed in the spring semester.

Eleven brothers filled a 15-cubic yard roll-off dumpster in a record time for the William Allen White Community Partnership local friends group and the Kansas State Historical Society.

2018 is the 150th anniversary of White’s birth in Emporia. He was a brother of the Kansas Alpha Chapter in the late 1880s aspiring to a career in newspapers. At 25-years of age, White was editing the editorial page of the Kansas City Star. At 27, he bought the Emporia Gazette in his birth city.
Fourteen months later he gained national attention with his editorial What’s the Matter with Kansas which was credited with helping to elect president Wm. McKinley and vice president Theodore Roosevelt. White was syndicated nation-wide and became known as the Sage of Emporia for his voice of reason emanating from the Heartland.

In 1924, White ran as a third-party candidate for governor with an anti-Ku Klux Klan platform. White lost the election, but his campaign contributed to Kansas being the first state to legally oust the Klan. A prolific writer, he wrote in many genres and championed the First Amendment all his life, dying in 1944.