Llewellyn Kiene had served four years in the office of sheriff of Shawnee County, and his administration had been all that his friends predicted and had been such as to give him rank among the ablest sheriffs this important county in the state had ever had.
Sheriff Kiene is a Kansan by many years of residence and is thoroughly in the spirit of the Sunflower commonwealth. He was born March 2, 1868, in Putnam County, Illinois, one of the twelve children of Francis A. and Rose (Doriot) Kiene. When he was fifteen years of age his parents came to Kansas, and he had been a resident of the state since 1882. His education in the meantime had been supplied by the public schools of his native county and the state normal school at Emporia.
Mr. Kiene is perhaps most widely known as a newspaper man, and was active in that profession for about twenty years before he became sheriff. His first work was as a reporter on the Topeka Daily Capital, beginning in 1891, and he afterwards served as city editor of the paper and later became managing editor of the Topeka State Journal. Mr. Kiene was managing editor with the Journal for about twenty years. He gave up that office in order to make a stirring canvass of the county as republican nominee for the office of sheriff, and was elected by a substantial majority in 1912 and re-elected in 1914 by over 8.000 majority.
He is a member of the Masonic Order and served on the Topeka School Board. On December 16, 1901, at Murfreesboro, Tennesee, he married Miss Martha Jaqueith. Mr. and Mrs. Kiene have five children.