In April, when the first 10 Microsoft employees reunited to recreate an office photo taken in the company’s early days, 72-year-old Miriam Lubow was proud to be placed front and center.
“She had missed the first photo because of a snow storm,” recalled Lubow’s daughter, Michelle Weinberg. “But she was actually employee number six.”
Lubow, who worked for Microsoft on and off for 10 years as an office manager, died on July 29 after a yearlong battle with liver cancer.
Born in Milan in 1935, Lubow and her family narrowly escaped from Europe at the outbreak of World War II.
“Before the war, her father sent the consulate a box of chocolates and inside box there was also some money. The next day, passports for the entire family appeared,” Weinberg said.
The family sailed to New York on the last passenger ship out of Italy. They remained in New York for the duration of the war with Lubow and her sister attending America’s first Montessori school.
After the war, Lubow and her family traveled back to Italy. She attended college in Switzerland and then returned once more to New York.
It was at Manhattan’s Temple Emanuel that she met Milton Lubow. The couple married in 1960. After the births of their four children, however, the Lubows began to think about moving somewhere else to raise the kids. They picked Albuquerque, N.M.
Once the kids were in high school, Lubow decided to return to the workforce. Weinberg remembers her mother answering a single ad in a local, community newspaper for a company called Microsoft that was looking for someone to do office work.
Lubow quickly took to her new employers and began referring to them as family.
“She always said the four of us were her kids at home and Bill Gates and Paul Allen were her kids at the office. When you think about it, they were in their 20s and she was in her 40s. She definitely took on a mothering role,” Weinberg said.
Along with her duties of bookkeeping, making travel arrangements and ordering office supplies, Lubow also transcribed notes for Gates, arranged barber appointments for him and made sure he ate his lunch each day.
When Lubow first took the job, she knew nothing about computers.
“In the beginning, at her desk was a typewriter,” recalled Weinberg. “She had heard the word “˜software,’ but she didn’t really know what it was.”
Weinberg said it wasn’t until her mother moved to Seattle that she really became comfortable using the technology her co-workers produced.
Lubow’s career had a substantial impact on her family. All four of the kids spent time during their high school years pitching in to do office work at Microsoft and two of them, Weinberg and Warren Lubow, went on to work for the company as adults. When Microsoft relocated from New Mexico to Washington, Gates urged Lubow to follow.
“He really wanted my mom to come,” Weinberg said. “But it wasn’t that easy to pick up the family and move. For a while, she commuted back and forth.”
The family did move eventually, settling initially in Kirkland.
Lubow was a member of Congregation Kol Ami in Woodinville as well as the founder of the Shalom Club, a Jewish social club that meets for holiday gatherings and Shabbat dinners at the Trilogy retirement community on Redmond Ridge.
Rahla Turck, a Trilogy resident, joined the Shalom Club when she and her husband moved to Redmond Ridge in 2000.
Turck said that she was impressed by Lubow’s energy and found herself quickly drawn into helping out with club correspondence as well as hosting annual Purim baking and Hanukkah latke making parties at her home.
“She was just the most energetic, opinionated, darling lady you ever want meet in your whole life,” Turck said of Lubow. “She just lit up a room.”
She noted that Lubow remained active in the club even in her later years, until her declining health forced her to sell her Redmond Ridge home and move in with her daughter.
Weinberg was quick to point out that the Shalom Club was not the first social organization that her mother had founded.
“She was always very proud of her Jewish Italian heritage. Everywhere she went, if there wasn’t an Italian club, she’d form one; same for Jewish organizations,” she said.
Weinberg said her mother also devoted considerable time during her last few years of life to writing her memoirs, which the family is determined to get published on her behalf.
Lubow is survived by her husband, Milton; her four children, Michelle, Stephanie, Yvonne and Warren; and six grandchildren.
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