What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [10]
And though she was an extremely shy girl, as she grew up Margie reveled in getting picked to play baseball with the boys in the close-knit, post-World War II suburb of Lombard, Illinois. She was faster, anyway, than most of them. Only a boy named Phillip could keep up with her.
“But I grew up before Title IX, and when I got to junior high school all that stopped,” she said, referring to the 1972 federal act that for the first time guaranteed girls equal educational opportunities in federally funded schools and opened the way to girls’ sports programs. The girls had no sports teams in her school. “And gym class was mostly a social thing for girls. We were happy to just watch the boys. But oh, how I envied those boys their real uniforms, real schedules of games, and real coaches to help develop their skills.”
When she was thirteen, her father suffered a fatal heart attack. He was fifty-three. It happened one night after her parents had a small party. Margie, frozen with fear, listened from her bed as she heard her father’s sudden, violent coughing. Recalling his death more than half a century later still renders her speechless. “I just can’t talk about it,” she told me one day at a picnic table outside the Y.
Though her older sister Joan Williams remembers Margie as innately competitive, Margie says that her father’s death was what instilled a powerful work ethic in her. Her mother—from whom she says she inherited the calm, relaxed quality that enhances her running—went to work full-time in a bank without any apparent complaint. Margie believed that if she didn’t work hard and get the best grades possible, she would never win a scholarship to a good college. She worked relentlessly, her sister says, at everything, including winning the first seat for the flute in the school band.
She was awarded a half-scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, where she majored in French. She played no sports there either, though there were a couple for women. “But I was too much of a coward to go out for them,” she said. She received a full scholarship to a new master’s in teaching program at the University of Chicago, where she met her husband, Hans Stoll. Paired with others, they met on a blind triple date. But he was a tall, smart, and skeptical Ph.D. candidate studying with Nobel Prize-winning supply-side economist Milton Friedman. More to the point, he wore an attractive hat. “I thought that was interesting,” she said. Margie was a beautiful, sophisticated-looking young woman—with a sparkle in her eyes and an easy laugh, which Hans says is what captured him. The morning after they met, he called her to go play Frisbee.
Margie began running when the couple moved to the capital after they were married in the early 1960s. Several days a week, she jogged around the Washington Monument and in Arlington National Cemetery. Later, after three children—Andy, Erica, and Kevin—were born and the family was living in Pennsylvania, Margie ran whenever she could. “I would take the kids and put them in the middle of a soccer field at Swarthmore College and try to get in four laps before I was needed. I guess I always wanted to run and was trying to find a way to do it,” she said.
In 1982, two years after moving to Nashville, life swerved off course. One morning while showering, Margie discovered a lump in one of her breasts. She immediately called her doctor. His assurance that it was probably nothing proved baseless. She had a malignancy. “Kevin was only five. And my first thought