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R. MARSHALL COON: PATRIARCH OF THESE HILLS
In 1961,
Marshall and Edith Coon drove along the pine scented dirt roads of embryonic
Pine Brook Hills, fell in love with its vistas and undulating terrain and
bought three lots. Two years later, they and their two young daughters
moved into the red brick ranch overlooking Two Mile Creek and the Boulder
Valley, that Marshall, with the help of a friend, built on one of the lots.
He never left and thirty eight years later Marshall still lives in the same
house, the fifth house built in Pine Brook.
A yellowing Boulder
Daily Camera from January 1964 has a picture of the house. It was the
largest house built in Boulder County in 1963. The photo also shows the
hills behind the house covered with a sparse sprinkling of Ponderosa pines.
It is striking to compare with the current heavy forest cover after four
decades of fire suppression.
 Shortly,
Marshall will be
traveling to Anthony, Kansas for his 70th high school reunion,
the only one from his graduating class. His parents had a farm there and
grew watermelons. As he still does, he clearly had empathy as a young
child. He remembers a hen jumping into his lap and promptly laying an egg.
The feel of that warm, fresh egg is still with him. Marshall also showed an
engineering bent early, building beds for barn mice at the age of three.
However, some of his teachers were not impressed: his second grade teacher
thought he was retarded and declared that he would not get very far in
life. Years later he became the first in his family to go to college, and
after getting a degree in Electrical Engineering from
Kansas
State,
visited the same teacher. Showing his diploma, he declared that he was
not retarded.
During the
war, Marshall
worked at Los
Alamos and met
J. Robert Oppenheimer. On
July 16, 1945 he was a
witness to the dawn of the nuclear age at Trinity site near Alamogordo, New
Mexico.
In 1951
Marshall and Edith moved to
Boulder.
He worked for the National Bureau of Standards and they lived a few blocks
away. His work focused on lightning research. That work took him to the
ends of the earth; from the two poles to so many countries that he can't
count them anymore. But one country he does remember. In Costa Rica they
found and adopted their two daughters, Jan and Lorajean. The family was now
complete.
Twelve years
after moving to
Boulder his love
of the mountains brought them to the red brick house in PBH. In those days,
with few residents, everyone was part of the fire department. Marshall and
John Seward were leaders in building the first fire house. He served as
President of the fire department and Fire Chief from time to time.
There were
more fires then but they were much better behaved than they are today.
Marshall and others observed a pattern with these fires; they usually
occurred between 4 and
7 p.m. on Sunday
afternoons two or three times a month. They were considerate, igniting in
places that were accessible and where they could be contained. They were
benign, avoiding structures and sticking to grassy areas. So frequently on
Sunday afternoons
Marshall
would crank up his CJ5 jeep and go off to fight the fire of the week with
several other men. It was a little scary but needless to say, he became a
fine fireman. Ah! The good old days!
In spite of
all the wildlife tripping over itself these days, Marshall and his family in
all their years here have seen only one bear and one mountain lion. The
bear was a cub that the family dog treed in the front yard. The girls were
out there enjoying the event until Edith reminded them that if Baby Bear was
in the tree, then someone else was probably close by. That brought them
into the house quickly, but they never did see Mama. While driving down on
Linden
just past the firehouse, a deer bounded across the road, followed by a
mountain lion. It was their only sighting, but his daughter, Jan, swears
that it was the biggest, baddest mountain lion ever. And in the car's
headlights, its large piercing eyes glowed green.
The abundant tree cover today owes a lot to
Marshall. In the 70s,
Pine Bark beetles were devastating large tracts along the Front Range.
Marshall
went and received informal training from the Forest Service, and became a
one man army against these invaders. He learnt how to spot an infested tree
from afar, where to cut looking for the beetles, how to treat with
Lindane and cover the logs with a tarp. For a period of three to four years,
he spent his weekends all over PBH, fighting these invaders.
In 1976 he
retired, but was far from done. He taught calculus at CU-Denver and
computer classes at a vocational school in
Boulder.
Edith died of
cancer in 1978. After 35 years of marriage, it was a devastating loss to
Marshall. But
he bounced back. He took up gliding for two years, flying out of Boulder
airport and catching the thermals above these hills. At age 75 he took up
scuba diving. He got so enraptured by the wonders under the waters that he
forgot about checking his oxygen. He ran out and his instructor had to
share his oxygen all the way to the top.
He kept his
mind busy. In the 80s he went to
Kenya for three months
and did all the electrical work for a hospital, including hydro-electric
power generation. About the same time, he invented and developed the
controls for a machine to clean and polish bowling lanes. The original
prototype sits in the dining room, neat stacks of IC chips fitted into a
meticulously carved wooden box, the work done in the basement workshop. (At
the Bureau of Standards, he had been one of the stars of the bowling league,
winning the championship four times).
In leaving I
ask Marshall
about his feelings for Pine Brook Hills today. His eyes light up and a
broad smile creases his face. "I love it," he says, "I will never move from
here."
June 29th
will be Marshall's
89th birthday. He is our oldest resident. Happy birthday,
Marshall!
From
The Pine Brook Press, Summer, 01 |
