LJWorld.com

“I was thrown into the writing world at the deep end when I interned at the Kansas City Star as a KU junior,” recalls Stanley Hamilton, 75, author of the book “Machine Gun Kelly’s Last Stand.”

“I worked alongside a few hundred hyperactive professionals responsible for putting out more than 10 daily editions of the newspaper. I learned a lot in a hurry; it was called survival. Those were heady days for someone who had a pretty sheltered upbringing.”

That upbringing began in Grand Island, Neb., and continued in Kansas City, Mo., when his family moved there in 1939. His Scottish father was a chemist and Wonder Bread’s main tester. His mother was born on a Lawrence farm that’s now the site of Free State High School.

He graduated from KU with a journalism degree and worked as a Star reporter and copy editor for four years. Covering day and night shifts didn’t leave much time for his young family, so he sought a better-paying job with more regular hours.

He was thrilled to be invited to Washington to become associate editor of Congress’ national magazine “Traffic World” in 1957.

“Washington, D.C., was, and in many ways still is, a mecca for journalists, and an exciting and exhilarating place to be,” he says.

Hamilton loved working in and around Capitol Hill, where he enjoyed a nearly 50-year career.

He became chief of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s publication staff in 1967, public affairs director of the American Bus Association in 1968, executive director of the Truckload Carriers Association in 1976, public affairs officer for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and predecessor agencies in 1987 and copy editor for “Transport Topics” in 2000.

Hamilton returned to Lawrence in 2003 to be near his aging parents, and his book “Machine Gun Kelly’s Last Stand” was published the same year.

George Kelly Barnes, whose nickname resulted from his boast of being able to write his name on a wall with machine-gun bullets, was hunted nationwide in connection with a series of abductions, bank holdups and massacres that terrified the nation in the late ’20s and early ’30s. The crime that finally led to his capture in 1933 was the kidnapping of Oklahoma oilman Charles F. Urschel, a friend and colleague of Hamilton’s uncle, Ralph J. Pryor.

“The victim chose my uncle as the drop man for the Kansas City payoff for the then-largest ransom in history,” Hamilton explains. “Luckily, Uncle Ralph was in Washington for a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on oil industry business at the time, and he missed the drop-off.”

In spite of a recent stroke, Hamilton remains active and excited about life and its possibilities. He writes every day and hopes to publish another book soon.