GRETCHEN HAMMOND

Author | Journalist | Photographer

Feature Stories

A small selection of Gretchen's feature stories published by Windy City Times and Tablet Magazine.

The last president of Shimer College

In a perfunctory statement, the trustees of a college, with a 164 year history, announced that it would “cease to exist.” Dr. Susan Henking, Ph.D. would serve as its 14th and last president. Surrounded by boxes, as she packed up to leave the campus, she reflected on the life of an academic. All her years of questioning, discovery, teaching and arguments have come to a head as one corner of America’s higher education system falls victim to a relentless assault.

Chicagoan looks back on concentration camps for Japanese-Americans

On the day Roy Wesley was born, his parents and grandparents had been ordered to relinquish all their property and report immediately to a concentration camp. There was no due process. No one spoke up in their defense. There were no signs of protest from those being loaded onto trains for transportation or their neighbors. The year was 1942. They were not living in Nazi-occupied Europe, but Portland, Oregon. Wesley spent the first two years of his life in detention with almost 127,000 of his fellow Japanese-Americans. This is his, and their, story.

Enduring Love, gay couple copes with Alzheimer's

There is an immediate and temperate sense of welcome to  Michael and Gregory’s condominium in the suburbs of Chicago.  Each of its rooms are filled with an extraordinary array of plants, books, art and photography neatly ordered amidst items of deep personal significance to their owners but easily understood to the stranger as intimate expressions of two inseparable lives.
Anyone who has known love, even for a moment, can recognize them. This is the extraordinary story of that love and the disease that tried and failed to vanquish it. 

How to donate a kidney to one of your newspaper's readers

In 2015, my editor received and published a letter from a woman in  desperate need of a kidney donor. I was assigned to write a feature about L.V. Jordan and her hope that someone would step up and help. I decided to go a step further and contacted the Mayo clinic in Rochester, MN offering to begin that process with a blood test in the mail. I had no idea where it would eventually take me and the woman who would become a second sister.

REPARATIONS The long battle for police torture survivors

In May 1973, Anthony Holmes was arrested and tortured by detectives investigating a murder. He was repeatedly shocked “by an electrical device housed in a box, and suffocated with a bag placed over [his] head. Holmes passed out from the pain, felt that he was dying, and, as a result, gave a detailed stationhouse confession to an assistant Cook County state’s attorney implicating himself in a murder that he has later insisted he did not commit.”
He wasn’t the only one. This is the story of a fight for justice that continues today and is even more vital than it was over a quarter century ago. 

At the heart of 'Mama' Gloria Allen

Gloria Allen was born at her grandparent’s Bowling Green, Kentucky, farm in 1945, just as the world was celebrating victory over tyranny and oppression. Yet, she would spend a life under it while society rendered judgement over her and her peers. Yet Gloria’s determination was so unshakable that she became beloved by all the souls she touched. They called her “mama” without a moment’s hesitation or doubt of kindred familiarity.

My Masada Moment

When I was 11, I watched the ABC miniseries Masada and was instantly besotted with it. I watched each of the four parts detailing the defiance of a small group of Jewish rebels against the Roman Tenth Legion over and over again. It inspired my eventual conversion to Judaism. Forty five years later and I finally climbed the Serpentine path to Masada’s summit and spoke with actor Peter Strauss about the story that seized upon my imagination as a child, despite the occasional anachronism such as pairs of Nike’s worn by Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s followers as they raided Roman encampments.