"Smile the while you kiss me sad adieu / When the clouds roll by I'll come to you / Then the skies will seem more blue / Down in lovers' lane, my dearie / Wedding bells will ring so merrily / Ev'ry tear will be a memory / So wait and pray each night for me."
As the last chorus of the song plays from the stereo, Billie Coon closes her eyes and mouths along with the words silently. The song ends, and she turns off the stereo.
It was the voice of Kenneth Coon, Billie's husband, singing along to a record of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, his voice piercing through that beautiful, prerecorded backdrop in perfect harmony.
Ken passed away early last month, almost exactly 60 years to the day after Billie first heard that voice sing.
"On September the 11th, my grandmother had her birthday, and all of us relatives went out there to her place off Mullan Road," recalls Billie. "Ken and I share a cousin - his mother's sister, aunt Ruth, married my mother's brother - so I was aware of him, but I didn't know him really.
"Anyway, that day I heard him sing, and - oh, boy! - did I fall for him," Billie continues with a smile of reminiscence. "Before he left for school on the 19th of September I was engaged to him."
Thus began the romance of a lifetime, a love that crisscrossed North America and traipsed off to Europe and other far reaches, a connection that drew on a shared love of history and geography, a partnership marked by nary a cross word.
"I can tell you five quarrels we had and they were all instigated by me," says Billie. "Let me tell you, I feel bad about them, every one. He simply never quarreled with me. To me it's a shock when I hear about women who have been abused; I know I must have been very fortunate to live my life with such a wonderful man."
Perhaps part of the secret was the fact that Ken and Billie were too busy dreaming up new adventures or diving ever deeper into the annals of history.
Indeed, to many in Missoula, Ken Coon was best known not as a singer, but as a font of knowledge about World War I history, old "militaria" - guns and swords and insignia of all types - trains and planes and the world beyond the horizon.
"We always had a cheerful and interesting relationship discussing military history and the military battlefields of the Western Front in World War I," recalled Hayes Otoupalik, a friend who has run the Missoula Gun Show for the past four decades. "We could sit around for hours talking on the same terms about that history."
Over the years, Billie's interests mirrored Ken's. While he collected old military armaments ("He never had an interest in shooting them," notes Billie. "He just loved the beauty of the gun and the history behind it."), she built her own collection of historic military insignia and patches.
She shared his love of old cars as well. The two golfed together wherever they went. She loved those airplanes that he flew, too.
"One of my most precious memories was playing golf at the course along the seaside where we lived in Newfoundland," Billie recalls. "That particular day, it was late summer, we finished and the ocean was lapping up on the beach and it was just a perfectly beautiful day. Ken looked out on the ocean and said, 'Let's go fly and watch the sun go down over the ocean.'
"Can you think of anything more romantic?" Billie muses.
Newfoundland wasn't the first off-the-beaten-track place the couple had lived. After marrying, the two lived in Oregon for awhile, where Ken worked as a teacher while Billie gave birth to their two eldest children, Paul and Robin. One Sunday, a missionary doctor from Dillingham, Alaska, came for a visit. As he showed slides depicting his life in Alaska, Ken started asking all manner of questions about teaching opportunities.
"Next thing you know," Billie recalls with a hearty laugh, "we're living with our two children - Paul was 7 and Robin was 2 - out on a peninsula in the Bering Sea, the only white people living with 119 Eskimos and about 300 dogs."
It was a harsh environment, to be sure; this was, after all, the middle of the 20th century, when Alaska was still virtually unknown territory for most mainland Americans. But Ken and Billie loved every minute of it - even when Billie had to bring her third child, David, home from the hospital after his birth via dogsled.
"Oh, it was so beautiful," recalls Billie. "We loved the Eskimos so, and we had so much fun together. When we came back to the Oregon, I would wake up sobbing in my dreams because I missed it so."
The two returned reluctantly to Oregon after two years in Alaska. They stayed there for a few years, until history repeated itself. This time, the visitor was from Newfoundland, and he too knew a bit about teaching opportunities on that faraway Canadian island.
Soon enough, the family was off again.
The family lived in Newfoundland from 1968 till 1984. Every summer, they would shuttle to the mainland and begin a cross-continental road trip back home to Montana and Oregon. Every time, the trek followed a different path - a path largely dictated by their love for old historic sites.
"We always stopped at the forts - name them and we were there," recalls Billie. "We were down at Fredericksburg. We saw the place where Jackson was shot by his troops, and so many of the Indian battlefields. We went to Appomattox; and our boys and Robin and Ken - this was in the '70s - they all walked every inch of Gettysburg. We've been to the Plains of Abraham in Canada, and I saw the well where they brought water to General Wolfe."
Daughter Robin recalls those trips with a great sense of nostalgia.
"It was always a great adventure with my father and mother," said Robin in a telephone interview from her home in Colorado. "We were sleeping in the car sometimes, wearing the same clothes for four days in a row - we didn't have much money, understand; but my parents never let a lack of funds get in the way of traveling."
And despite the culture shock that was evident even at her young age, Robin loved Newfoundland, too.
"I really do have good memories of Newfoundland," Robin said. "The storms, the ocean, the blizzards. ... The experience really brought us incredibly close as a family because there wasn't a lot of social activities. After school you went home and spent the evening with your parents and brothers; there wasn't a lot of the kind of distractions and endless activities that we have now."
Robin says one characteristic of her father made that close and constant relationship all the easier: his ability to listen.
"He was an incredible listener," she said. "I remember being a teenager and I could always talk to Dad, there was never a feeling of him not understanding me or any of the discord that a lot of teens go through. He wouldn't solve your problem, he'd just sit there and listen, and in the end you'd feel better. That's the thing about Dad that I highly respected and appreciated - especially now that I'm older."
In the spring of 1980, while still living in Newfoundland, Ken fell ill with a mysterious malady that paralyzed his legs. Though sensation eventually came back, he was left using crutches. He began to lose weight. Doctors diagnosed the ailment as cancer of the spine. Within a year, Ken was down to 110 pounds.
"The doctors said, 'He's dying on us, so you might as well take him wherever he wants to go,' " recalls Billie. "We had a motor home, the two boys flew out - this was after they'd moved away - and we all took him across the states to Portland."
There, doctors came up with a radically different diagnosis: Guillian Barre Syndrome, an extremely rare disorder of the peripheral nervous system. Under a new treatment regimen, Ken finally began to improve. Though he never walked well again, and despite slowly compounding difficulties in both his hands and legs, Ken remained the fun-loving, adventurous man he had always been.
"Dad very rarely would get tense or angry or irritable, and if he did you knew he was in incredible pain," recalled Robin. "He coped with it, always with a smile."
Hayes Otoupalik choked back tears as he recalled the very same characteristic in his friend.
"The thing he never lost was that he was always so energetic," said Otoupalik. "It always meant the world to me and was so powerful a statement about life: To be in such a tough damn spot yourself and not impart that on others, to always have a smile and a kind word - that was always a very moving thing to me. He just made you feel like you didn't have any worries in this world."
A stroke ultimately took Ken from this world. But as Billie Coon gazes at a photograph of her dearly departed, she is simply grateful to have spent those decades with him, and to have those mementos - the audiotapes and photos, the plastic models he built of steamer ships, the indelible recollections of broad experiences and deep sharing.
"He was so much fun to live with, and I love him so," Billie says.
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