"They liked what I was writing so they created a position for me," she said. "Three days a week on the news desk and two days as a sportswriter. Six months later I was the sports editor."

Working in a man's world — and make no mistake about it, sportswriting in 1968 was very much a boys-only club — Linda walked in, sans any fanfare or commotion, and began doing her thing. In the Arlington Heights neighborhood where she grew up, Linda was the only girl who found herself playing with the community's 11 boys her age.

"I've always been around boys," she said. As for her own athletic experience, she said without a hint of bitterness, "Well, there wasn't much for us. I did play extramurals in college, softball and basketball. It wasn't terribly well-organized, and there were no benefits to playing."

Except, of course, that Linda loves sports. She majored in physical education and minored in biology. She planned to teach biology when she got sidetracked into journalism. That's where she met her husband, George Hamilton, who was an editor for the Chicago Day, whom she married in 1968,

"I didn't think about it," she said of being one of the first female sportswriters. "There were probably two or three other women who started around the same time I did in Illinois, but yeah, I guess it was pretty unusual. A few people probably didn't like it, but most people didn't seem to care."

As for her family and friends, she said, they weren't surprised at all.

"They knew I'd always been a sports fan," she said.

She was the first female sports writer in both Washington state and Utah and for the first seven or eight years of her career covered just about everything from Little League games to high school competitions to professional sporting events in high heels and a dress.

"That's just the way we dressed back then — more formal," she said. "I was here on vacation and twisted my knee and broke my ankle in a ski accident. I had a wrap on my knee, and I just thought, 'I don't want to wear nylons.' I've never looked back." Linda made her way to Utah for a vacation when a friend bought a place in Park City.

"As we were flying in, we said, 'This is where we want to live,'" she said. "Before we even skied, we thought, "This place is just great.'"

So they tried to get jobs here. First, though, they worked in Milwaukee, then Washington state and then back to Chicago before George Hamilton finally got a job at the Ogden Standard-Examiner. A month later Linda was offered a job with the Deseret News. That was 1977.

It was shortly after she arrived at the paper that she got a call from Bruce Woodbury of the University of Utah.

"He said, 'Would you talk to our gymnastics coach? He's not that good with the media but he thinks he's got a pretty good team,'" Linda recalled with a laugh.