Locally owned since 1867
Monday, June 1, 2020
iolaregister.com
Protests, distrust hit COVID control
Racing returns to Humboldt Speedway
PAGE B1
Allen County courts to reopen
PAGE A2
Protests could influence Biden’s VP selection PAGE B2 There’s nothing wrong with being a single mom
By MIKE STOBBE The Associated press
PAGE B3
The Iola Public Library is reopening its doors to the public Tuesday, but with several health safeguards in place. REGISTER FILE PHOTO
Library reopens, but bring a mask The Iola Public Library will reopen its doors to the public Tuesday, with continued safeguards for COVID-19 protection. The library will continue to offer curbside delivery as an option for those who prefer not to come into the building or who don’t want to wear a mask. Masks are required for entering the building, accord-
ing to a library press release. “According to the reopening plan we wrote, in order to move to Phase 2 we needed to have sneeze guards installed and for the number of COVID cases in Kansas to show a sustained decline,” Director Roger Carswell said in the press release. “Both of those conditions have now been met, and we are eager to welcome people back into
the building.” The library’s hours remain the same as in Phase 1: Mondays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. All re-shelving of materials will be done outside of those hours. Social distancing should be observed in the library, See LIBRARY | Page A4
Does your medical bill seem too high? Maybe it is By CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN Kansas News Service
Got a medical bill that seems too high? First step: Ask if there’s been a mistake. Next step, fight back. The tips below come from a dozen experts in law, medical billing and patient advocacy. They agreed on many points, including this frustrating one: None of these strategies is guaranteed to make a big — even blatantly excessive — medical bill go away. They represent a scattershot approach for people with urgent bills now — who can’t sit around and wait for Congress to pass reforms to medical billing. ‘Don’t just let the bills pile
unreasonable,” he says. “That it’s too high and that you would like to discuss how they came about this amount and what a reasonable amount would be.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Protests erupting across the nation over the past week — and law enforcement’s response to them — are threatening to upend efforts by health officials to track and contain the spread of coronavirus just as those efforts were finally getting underway. Health experts need newly infected people to remember and recount everyone they’ve interacted with over several days in order to alert others who may have been exposed, and prevent them from spreading the disease further. But that process, known as contact tracing, relies on people knowing who they’ve been in contact with — a daunting task if they’ve been to a mass gathering. And the process relies on something that may suddenly be in especially short supply: Trust in government. “These events that are happening now are further See PROTESTS | Page A2
You don’t necessarily owe what the biller says you owe.
up and don’t just ignore them.’
George Nation, a professor of law and business at Lehigh University, says your biller can argue later that you nev-
er contested the charge and essentially admitted you owe it. “Put in writing (to them) that you’re contesting the bill, that you’re saying it’s
You got an appendectomy. The folks at the hospital deserve to get paid. But how much? They asked you in advance to sign a form that might look something like this, effectively promising to pay the eventual bill. But they didn’t give you a price. Duke University professor of law and business administration Barak Richman says See BILLS | Page A2
A Minneapolis protester is helped by others after Minneapolis police moved in with tear gas during a protest Saturday. MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE/LEILA NAVIDI/TNS
The trials of Wiley Welch
I
The sandstone memorial to the Davidson family warms in the sun near the unmarked grave of John Welch, who was fatally wounded in the gunfight on the Yates Center square. REGISTER/ TREVOR HOAG
was sitting in Kalida Cemetery, near the final resting place of John Welch, who was killed in the infamous gun battle on the Yates Center square sometime around April 1880, when the town was only a few years old. It began when John’s brother, Wiley, and other cowhands from Garnett had left a dance out at Dry Creek in northwestern Woodson County one frozen Christmas night. Perhaps grimacing at the thought of the frigid wind sweeping across the open ranchlands, Welch stole a coat
Trevor Hoag Just Prairie and pair of gloves belonging to Warren Walters. Not long after, Welch was apprehended in Le Roy and arrested, and would spend the next three months in the plank-board jail near Yates Center square’s northeastern corner.
ON THE day of Wiley Welch’s trial, the townsfolk had gathered at the old Defiance courthouse in droves, which also sat on the square’s northeastern corner. In a wild tear, though, they had poured from the benches and into the dirt streets after hearing gunfire, then just as quickly darted back behind whatever cover they could find. Abraham Smith, who’d just finished his term as Sheriff, would take a less cautious See WELCH | Page A4
Order Today...
Vol. 122, No. 151 Iola, KS 75 Cents
DELIVERED TOMORROW order today by 1 p.m. & get by noon tomorrow 2103 S. Sante Fe Chanute, KS
620-431-6070
DELIVERY TO IOLA & HUMBOLDT ARE ON IN-STOCK ITEMS ONLY