inda Alvarado wends her way, politician-style, to her seat at Major League Baseball’s 2021 All-Star Game, pausing to hug or chat up everyone from Roy working the concession booth to Colorado Rockies CFO Hal Roth. As a pregame tribute to Hank Aaron begins, she pulls up on her phone a photo of herself with the late Hall of Fame slugger. “Baseball is in my blood,” she declares. Dressed in a purple suit that matches the Rockies’ dominant uniform color, Alvarado is more than just another uberfan.
Alvarado’s backstory is anything but conventional. She started life in 1951 as Linda Martinez in a two-room adobe house outside Albuquerque, New Mexico; it had no running water except when it flooded every summer. “I thought everyone went to the Red Cross for summer vacation,’’ she quips. The groundskeeping experience opened the door for Alvarado to land a job at a Los Angeles construction management company after she graduated in 1973. That, and a little subterfuge—she figures she got an interview because she used only her initials on the application, disguising her gender. It’s a method she’d use later when signing construction bids.
A big test came in 1992, when two ironworkers installing a beam fell to their death while Alvarado Construction was building an office tower at Denver’s airport. While all work stopped for an OSHA investigation, Alvarado had to fend off other contractors angling to take over the job. “I had to rebuild my reputation,” she says.
Wow! What an amazing and inspiring story of perseverance and entrepreneurship.
Alvarado says she has succeeded by not being distracted by “conventional thinking.”