BOULDER — Laurence “Laurie” Paddock, a consummate community journalist who presided over the Daily Camera newsroom for 32 years, and whose family guided the newspaper for a century, died Thursday night in Boulder. He was 88.
“It is hard to imagine one man’s life having more of an impact on his community and the lives of so many people than Laurie,” said Al Manzi, Camera publisher and CEO of Prairie Mountain Publishing. “His passing is certainly sad, but we should all be celebrating the life of a man that truly spent his life in service to the people he worked with and the community he served.
“The legend of his work lives on at the Camera and throughout Boulder.”
Paddock worked for the Camera for 42 years, the final 32 of which he spent as editor, but he was a fixture in the newsroom from the time he could walk.
In the 1930s, Paddock, then a small child, would often visit the Camera building at 11th and Pearl Streets with his mother, stealing chocolates from his great-aunt’s desk, distracting his father, A.A. Paddock, a reporter (and, later, editor), and then climbing atop the lap of editor Lucius Paddock, his grandfather and one of Colorado’s original newspapermen.
Lucius Paddock bought a half interest in the Camera in 1892, and the Paddock name — from Lucius to A.A. to Laurie — would appear on the paper’s masthead every day for the next 100 years.
“My father infected me with his interest in Boulder history, and there’s no cure,” Paddock said in a 2013 interview.
The dynasty came to a close in August 1992, when Paddock retired one day before his 65th birthday. By that point, he’d held nearly every conceivable job at the paper, including editor, reporter, photographer, paper boy and janitor.
Paddock’s career in journalism started early, when he became co-editor of Hilltop News at the University Hill Intermediate School. His romantic career kicked off there, too.
“Sometime in seventh or eighth grade, my dad walked up to my mom,” said their son, Eric. “My dad mumbled sometimes, and he asked her some question, and she said, ‘Well, I’d love to go to the dance with you,’ when in fact he was just asking her a question about math homework. He didn’t correct her, and took her to the dance. And that was that.”
He would marry that dance partner, Harriett Lehnen, who died in 2008. They had two children, Eric and Laurence Jr., and shared the same home on 13th Street below Chautauqua Park for 55 years.
