Laurence Kilpatrick Hammack is a third-generation print journalist.
He is named after his late grandfather, George Kilpatrick, who in the 1920s was the editor and publisher of the Brunswick Times-Gazette, a weekly newspaper in the small town of Lawrenceville, Virginia, where Laurence grew up.
In 1928, George Kilpatrick was murdered in his own newsroom. He had just finished work on the linotype machine, and was washing ink from his hands at a sink, when he was approached by a former employee who had recently been let go.
The man opened fire with a pistol, killing George Kilpatrick instantly. He then walked out of the newspaper building, bought more ammunition from a nearby hardware store, and killed himself with the same weapon.
Two months later, Laurence’s mother, Georgia Kilpatrick, was born. Although she never knew her father, Georgia followed in his journalistic footsteps – writing a column for The South Hill Enterprise, which operates a bureau in Lawrenceville, for more than 25 years.
She called the column MScellaneous, for the woman’s perspective it brought to ordinary events like working in the garden or house-cleaning. Shortly after filing her last column in the winter of 2002, Georgia underwent surgery for the cancer that took her life three months later.
After more than three decades in the newspaper business, Laurence is continuing a family tradition in the memory of George Kilpatrick and Georgia Kilpatrick Hammack.