Family raises funds for room in name of Johnny Koon
On a rainy October evening in 2011, several members of the Koon family, of Westover, assembled in the meeting hall of a church to do something sonically wondrous.
With patriarch George Koon leading the charge, they set their voices soaring on “Still Feelin’ Fine.”
That’s the rollicking tune penned and performed in the late 1940s by Mosie Lister, long recognized by fans of that genre as the Shakespeare of Southern gospel music:
“…Well, I’m still feelin’ fine after all this time/I’m feelin’ mighty fine today
Every day I’m climbin’ just a little bit higher/Walkin’ up the King’s Highway
I still wanna go where the milk and honey flow/And I’m not gonna change my mind
Happy on the journey, and I’m still feelin’ mighty fine …”
The Koon kids grew up performing this music to cheers across the American South and Midwest.
They sang at Sunday services and church suppers, and filled slots on the religious radio and TV stations up and down the dial.
They hit the road in 1966, and never mind Beatle haircuts, the British Invasion, or that it was just one year away from the Summer of Love.
There were county fairs and concert venues, too, as the singing siblings from West Virginia often opened for the Blue Ridge Quartet and other Southern gospel superstars of the day.
George, who studied music at WVU before dropping out to fight in World War II and raise a family, bought a bus and fixed it up — and matriarch Lottie Koon learned how to shift gears (and play piano).
Those bus tours stopped years ago, but the family, which recently marked a half-century as a musical act, still performs on special occasions.
“Singing is what we do,” David Koon said, on that (not-so) long ago autumn evening, as summed up his growing-up years with his brothers and sisters.
“We don’t claim to be a ‘perfect’ family,” he said, in a rumbling bass voice.
“But we do have this music. It is uplifting, and it will get you through. Faith isn’t easy. Life isn’t easy.”
They were tested pretty hard on the above in 2005.
That’s when John’s son, Johnny, a fun-loving kid with a quick wit who had started singing with the family, died of brain cancer.
He was 14 years old. Doctors found the tumor when he was 9.
Johnny Koon was why all those Koon family friends assembled Sunday afternoon at the Erickson Alumni Center.
Of love songs and alien abductions
After his death, his parents, John and Michele, formed the Johnny Koon Pediatric Brain Tumor Research Fund to raise money for just that — such malignancies in the brain are leading cause of death for youngsters in the U.S. between the ages of 1 and 14.
Visit https://www.forjohnnykoon.com/about_us for more information on the fund.
“We weren’t going to give up,” John Koon said, “because Johnny never gave up. I never saw a kid that brave.”
Sunday’s event at Erickson was for something not related to global research.
It was immediate, and more personal.
The Koon family was hoping to raise $25,000 for the right to name an infusion room in Johnny’s honor at the under-construction WVU Children’s Hospital, which will rise 9 stories next to J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital, in Evansdale.
Johnny’s sister, Ashley Koon, now 26 and an actress in Seattle, organized the fundraiser.
She and her brother were among the youngest of the Koon musical progeny to take up the Southern gospel mantle before Johnny got sick.
Putting her brother’s name on a room where children go for chemotherapy gives a personal touch for a kid — in an environment of white coats and scary procedures that can sometimes seem as cold or as impersonal as could be.
The face her brother put on cancer, she said, was that of an enemy that was going to be soundly (but good-naturedly) slapped into the corner, beaten.
“I don’t know how he kept his sense of humor,” she said.
“Kids would ask him about his surgical scars, and he’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, that was when the aliens abducted me.’ Things like that.”
‘Let’s roll’ — and take it, Chuck Berry
John didn’t know how his son would react when he was told, at 13, that his cancer was back and that more surgeries would be necessary.
He and Michele faced intense eye contact from their son, as opposed to tears.
“He looked at us and said, ‘Let’s roll. Let’s get it done.’ ”
Johnny was unable to speak for one nine-month stretch during his treatment, so he and his dad communicated via a notepad.
There were scrawled notes and silly drawings and puns and “Dad” jokes from margin to margin.
There was heart from an ill youngster so startling, that dad said, that he would have to quickly blink a tear away.
During one exchange, when they were passing the pad back and forth in a discourse on illness and why things happen the way they do sometimes, John wrote, “Johnny — who’s in charge?”
The son pointed to the ceiling and mouthed a word.
John didn’t have to read lips to know what was said.
It was one word from a kid trying to stay happy on the journey — no matter what.
“He said, ‘God.’ ”
Ashley Koon, meanwhile, wears a tribute daily for her brother and for the musical lineage of her family.
It was revealed when she gave a hug to a friend who came to the fundraiser who hadn’t seen her since her graduation from WVU and move to the Pacific Northwest.
A strap on her gown slipped to show a tattoo.
It was a tracing of her brother’s actual handwriting.
“Johnny B. Goode,” it read.
