By Victor Greto
About 15 years ago, a future Delaware senator waited humbly in the lobby of the Louis Redding Building on French Street in Wilmington and wondered if Annie Margaret Lingenfelter wanted to get a cup of coffee with him.
Annie had met Chris Coons at an AmeriCorps convention in Rehoboth Beach in January 1995, a couple of weekends earlier, and they had hit it off.
Well, they had at least jogged one morning together after Coons introduced himself and asked her to run with him. Both had been appointed to the Delaware board of AmeriCorps, a national organization of networked social programs founded by the federal government.
Coons then called Annie a few days later, ostensibly to talk business.
The following week, Coons – who would win a hard-fought race for Vice President Joe Biden’s former Senate seat a decade and a half later against upstart Republican contender Christine O’Donnell – appeared in the lobby, and had told the receptionist of the New Castle County Executive, where Annie worked, that he’d like to have coffee with his new friend.
She had no idea he was coming. She decided to have coffee with him that morning. They hit it off again.
Only a few weeks after the coffee, Coons took Annie out to a restaurant on St. Patrick’s Day and said, “You were the person I’ve been looking for all my life.”
Nice line. Not only did it come fast, it worked.
“He was so funny and kind and able to have a conversation,” says Annie, 44, reminiscing in the living room of the Wilmington home she shares with Coons, their three children and one dog, a lab-corgi mix named Riley.
At 5-foot-2, eyes of blue and hair of gold, Annie Lingenfelter of Lancaster, Pa., eventually married Chris Coons in November 1996, a handful of years before Coons began a political career that eventually catapulted him into the Senate.
But, before we even get to the marriage, Chris Coons had at least one more romantic notion up his sleeve. He proposed to Annie on New Year’s Eve 1995 – in Hawaii, on the beach.
They had been dating for about 10 months, and there was plenty of chemistry between them for Annie to realize the question was imminent – especially when he asked her to go to Hawaii.
“But I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high,” she says.
Neither had been married before. It was all so new. And, by all accounts, it’s been pretty good ever since. They have twin boys, Mike and Jack, 11, and a girl, Maggie, 9, all of whom attend Wilmington Friends School.
“Annie is one of the busiest women I know,” says her friend Brooke McLeod. “First, she’s a mom. Her children are the light of her life, and she helped her husband run a senatorial campaign up and down the state.”
McLeod, 30, recently became a mother.
“Me being a new mom, I’ve leaned on Annie a lot,” she says. “She’s become a confidant of mine, I value that. Any mom recognizes the value of her time, and Annie is the first one to share hers. It’s a blessing in my life and my husband’s.”
McLeod is one of up to a dozen women who gather three mornings a week – Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30 a.m., and Saturdays at 7 a.m. – to run with Annie, to stay in shape, to train for marathons or charity runs and to talk about anything under the early morning sun that concerns professional wives, from jobs to children.
Annie has run in the 2005 Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC, the 2006 New York City Marathon, the 2007 Chicago Marathon and the 2008 Philadelphia Marathon.
Not this year.
“I’ve been training for the Chris Coons Marathon race for the Senate,” she says.
She hasn’t stopped her thrice-weekly runs, however. In fact, she and about a dozen other friends dragged themselves out of bed election-day morning to run eight miles.
Much of this marathon-running was inspired by one of the first runners to join Annie each morning, Samantha Balick, 40, a neighbor, who met Annie seven years ago.
“I decided I was going to run a marathon and knew she was a runner,” says Balick, 40. “I saw her running around town with another woman, and called her and asked her to run with me for the company.”
It’s a diverse group of women, says Teresa Devine, 44, a neighbor and dentist with a practice in Broomall, Pa.
“You hang around people with the same values,” she says. “It’s one of those things where we’re in the same point of our lives. We’re not young people, but we’re not the older generation either.”
A little more than four decades ago, Annie came into the world as the oldest of two siblings born to teachers, Tony and Dottie Lingenfelter, in Lancaster, Pa., in 1966.
Dottie taught remedial reading and fifth grade at Sacred Heart Elementary School, where Annie would attend.
Tony taught and coached wrestling at the high school for a short time, but soon after the children were born, he helped to open up several Turkey Hill convenience stores. He did that for years before he and his wife opened up their own daycare.
At Lancaster Catholic High School, Annie spent her days playing field hockey, basketball and track. She even cheerleaded.
She wanted to be a lawyer, and she liked studying history and politics.
So much so that after graduating from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in 1988 with a degree in Political Science, she got a call from a Delaware friend, Jeff Forbes, who had graduated a year ahead of her and was working on the U.S. Senate race of Sam Beard.
They needed someone to help coordinate the campaign in Kent and Sussex counties.
“I fell in love with politics then,” she says, and told Beard she wanted to stay. He set up interviews for her.
It wasn’t easy at first, and she got a job working for Harry’s Savoy Grill on Naaman’s Road for a little more than a year. But then she got a job working for New Castle County Executive Dennis Greenhouse as Community Prevention Coordinator.
She helped organize a summer basketball league, worked with school counselors, and also represented Greenhouse with all the nonprofits in the county.
By the mid-1990s, she had gotten the attention of Gov. Tom Carper, who appointed her to the board of AmeriCorps, where she met Coons.
By then, Coons, who was born in Greenwich, Conn., but who grew up in Hockessin, lived in New York and worked for the “I Have a Dream” foundation.
After he started dating Annie, he returned to Delaware and became a lawyer for W.L. Gore and Associates.
He simultaneously began his political career, elected as a Delaware delegate to the 1996 Democratic National Convention. He entered state politics full-force in 2000, when he was elected New Castle County Council President. He was serving a second term as New Castle County Executive when he was elected to the Senate in November.
From the start of Chris’ political career, Annie decided to stop working outside the home and help build a family, beginning with her twin boys, whose births provided enough complications for her to volunteer for St. Francis Hospital Foundation Board.
“Occasionally I think about what it would have been like to be a lawyer,” she says. “But I feel very fulfilled.”
So much so, that much of her conversation revolves around her husband’s political hopes.
“I’m a champion of who Chris is,” she says.
Now that her husband is going to the Senate, Annie says she and the children will remain in Delaware, Chris commuting to and from Delaware on the train, just like Vice President Biden did when he held the seat.
“He will have an office and a cot,” she says, “but he’ll take the train as much as possible.”
But remaining in the First State is a no-brainer.
“We want to raise our kids here,” she says. “We’re sticking with Delaware.”