The Lawton Constitution

When John Shepler took over The Lawton Constitution in 1910, typewriters and hand-or-machine-set type were the standard. In 1955, when The Lawton Publishing Company moved to its new building at Southwest 3rd Street and A Avenue, the structure was filled with the most up-to-date machinery and equipment, including the latest Linotype machines with which an expert could set up to seven lines of type in one minute.

Today, typewriters have given way to computers, and Linotype machines to laser typesetters. Progress and staying on the leading edge of technology have always been a benchmark of the Lawton newspaper, the survivor of a fierce newspaper war that followed the birth of Lawton in 1901.

Fifteen newspapers were started in the years after the 1901 lottery, but by the mid-1910s there were only two surviving daily newspapers: The Lawton Daily Constitution and The Lawton News.