In Memoriam: Virginia McKechnie

Virginia McKechnie

May 25, 2015

Virginia McKechnie
Virginia McKechnie (Ginny), of Cockeysville and Riderwood, Maryland, died of an aneurysm May 25, at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. She was 86.

Born Virginia Ullrich in Mount Clemens, Michigan, she was the daughter of Jacob Ullrich, a banker, and Edythe Calvert Ullrich, a homemaker. She earned a business degree at Michigan State University and taught briefly. In 1950, she married her first husband, William Tomlinson, and developed an appreciation for handmade things while stationed in Bavaria over the next decade. They moved to Baltimore in 1961 and founded The Tomlinson Collection, an art gallery that opened in Pikesville in 1970 and moved to the Rotunda a year later.  In 1973, Ginny expanded the business to include finely crafted jewelry and housewares under the Tomlinson Craft Collection brand.  At one point in the 1980s,  she presided over three stores: The Rotunda, Mount Vernon [on Charles Street] and Harborplace. She sold the business in 1998.

Virginia McKechnie, Tomlinson Craft Collection
Ginny McKechnie admired and sold artisanal merchandise at Tomlinson Craft Collection, a boutique business that she founded in 1973.

Mrs. McKechnie was a past treasurer for the Baltimore County League of Women Voters. She loved music and was a patron of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Pro Musica Rara, Baltimore Choral Arts Society, and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; and sponsored pianist Tamara Trykar Lu to study with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory. She was a member of the Towson Unitarian Universalist Church.

She supported the Thomas More Project, a tutoring program for children in the former Murphy Homes neighborhood of West Baltimore and tutored at the old St. Pius V Church and at Viva House. She also supported the Jewish Studies Program, which provides funding for a Jew to teach Scripture and Holocaust studies at Catholic schools.

Survivors include her husband of 36 years, A. Randell McKechnie, a retired intelligence linguist; sons, Dr. W. Craig Tomlinson of New York City and Andrew Tomlinson of Baltimore; a brother, James Ullrich of Mount Clemens, MI; and three grandsons. Her marriage to William Tomlinson ended in divorce.

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