“I've been running more and more,” Linda responded. “I have in mind to run a marathon.”
“A marathon!”
“Not this fall, but maybe next. I can run ten miles already.”
I'd seen her running by enough mornings to know she was pretty fast, too.
“The New York Marathon is next fall,” she said. “I'd run Boston this spring, but they still won't let women enter the race.”
It wasn't something women did much then, sports of any kind. That year, fewer than 300,000 American high school girls had taken part in interscholastic sports. Even men didn't run marathons much: only 126 ran the first New York City Marathon, competing for recycled bowling trophies. So I suppose it was a comment on how much the Wednesday Sisters had changed that we didn't think she was loony for wanting to run that far. Or a comment on how well we knew Linda by then. You get to know someone whose writing you critique every week in a way you don't get to know anyone else; you learn things about them they don't know themselves.
We spent so much time celebrating that evening and talking about our own dreams and successes that we forgot entirely about Miss America. Bert Parks was practically naming Miss Congeniality when we turned on the TV. No time for us to pick the winner, Miss Ohio, who looked to me like a brunette version of Linda, with straight hair pulled back from her forehead and a perfect mouth, a perfect nose, perfect eyes. She didn't sound at all like Linda, though. “Now a lot of anxiety is released,” she said, the stiffest first words ever uttered by a new Miss America. “Phyllis was a remarkable Miss America,” she said. “If I could do half of what she did, then I know I would not be just an image.”
Linda would have been considerably spunkier than that even if she'd just finished running a marathon, I remember thinking. Kath would have, too, even if the other Kathy was the one interviewing her. Brett would have even if she'd lost to her sister, the doctor-to-be, and quiet Ally would have, too, even if she'd just been through labor, just given birth. Not one of us would have sounded so ditzy, wearing that Miss America crown or not—that's what I thought that night. Underestimating, I see now, the effect of the stage and lights, the audience. Underestimating the blush of unexpected success.
MY FIRST PHONE CALL with my editor was a little like a first date: we talked less about “Michelangelo's Ghost” than about where we'd grown up and what we liked to read. I hung up looking forward to working with him. And then . . . nothing. Weeks went by with no contract, no further phone call. I took to asking Danny every once in a while if I hadn't just dreamed it.
All the while Danny was still working nonstop. The second MOS device, the 1103, had turned out to be a brilliant success—memory at less than a penny per bit—which you would think would have given him time to relax. But they were already developing the next-generation product, making something even better, and on top of that, he'd been drafted onto the public offering team, helping the investment bankers and the lawyers take the company's stock public. Near as I could tell, those investment bankers worked all the time, and even after they went home at midnight their poor lawyers stayed on.
That spate of hard work definitely paid off, though. On October 13—a Wednesday—the company went public. The Intel offering was “oversubscribed,” a fancy way of saying they had buyers for more shares than they had to sell. Shares sold at $23.50, almost five times what Danny had paid for the stock he'd bought in the employee purchase plan. I didn't know how much that meant for us, but maybe I could get a new oven? Or maybe we could get a second car—a used one—and keep the old oven.
At the celebration that night, Danny fell asleep sitting up in a chair.
He would end up working impossibly hard through mid-November getting the new 4004 ready for release—Intel's first microprocessor, though they didn't call it that; they called it a “micro-programmable computer on a chip.” It was something to be a part of, really; I think most company wives felt that way. Yes, sometimes we wondered if it was worth the empty seat at the dinner table, the picnics and baseball outings and family vacations postponed. But we saw ourselves as playing a supporting role in something important, something we were sure would change the world although we didn't quite know how.
That weekend after the company went public, though, there were no problems, only celebration and hope and happiness. Danny went off with Mags and Davy Saturday morning, very mischievously, and came home two hours later driving a brand-new Chevy Malibu convertible, a cherry-red four-seater with “dark saddle” bucket seats, air-conditioning, and a push-button radio and eight-track tape player to boot. I'd never have guessed him to be a red-convertible kind of guy, I remember thinking after I'd gotten over the shock of seeing that car in my own driveway. The thing was beautiful, and he clearly deserved it. But what about the kids' college fund? What about putting something away for a rainy day?