The Bill Hammons Story
W.R. Hammons: A Life of Writing and Running
Bill Hammons was born to a US Army officer and an American mother in Bad Kreuznach, Germany in 1974 (the header image above is of his first hometown of Bad Kreuznach). The family returned to the States when he was three, and Bill grew up in Odessa in West Texas of Friday Night Lights fame. Bill has deep roots in the Lone Star State; more than one of his ancestors arrived in Texas in 1846, the year after Texas’s incorporation into the United States, and Bill’s maternal grandparents arrived in Odessa on the original Pearl Harbor Day in December 1941.
Credit: New York Road Runners Club
Bill hit the road the day after graduating from Permian High School (again, of Friday Night Lights fame), graduated from NYU in 1997 with a degree in English and American Literature, and worked in management at Newsweek Magazine for seven years and seven days before hitting the road once more, this time for Colorado to enjoy the running trails, where he lived for 14 years (12 of those in Boulder) before returning to his home state of Texas. Bill has family in Texas, and he’s technically an Austinite, even though he still spends half his time in Colorado when he’s Stateside (see below), and he refers to himself as a “ColoTexan.”
Credit: W.R. Hammons
Credit: W.R. Hammons
Bill is currently traveling the world as a digital nomad, teaching a lot of English and learning a bit of German along the way; since stepping aboard a plane for Frankfurt, Germany in August 2021 (the day after his father’s last memorial service), he’s visited Germany, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, Italy, France, England, Scotland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Egypt, Jordan, Greece, Spain, Morocco, Gibraltar and Georgia, and the story continues …
Credit: W.R. Hammons