Love story: Paul and Margaret Hoon

Published 11:26 pm Tuesday, June 26, 2007

It was chilly in the auditorium where the high school choir was rehearsing. Paul Hoon knew the heat had been turned off.

In the row in front of Paul was Margaret Jones. She was holding hands with her girlfriend, trying to ward off the cold.

“I thought, ‘I can do that,’ ” Paul said.

He was holding Margaret’s hand before he even knew her name.

Margaret was 14 years old and Paul 18 when they met. The couple wasted no time and began dating. On their second date they started going steady.

“While she was still in high school I bought her a diamond ring,” Paul said.

When Margaret got out of high school, she and Paul were married.

Paul and Margaret Hoon of Arlington recently celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary.

The couple were married June 21, 1942, in Huntington, Ind.

They have four children, seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

In September of their wedding year, Paul joined the Army Air Corps.

“I got into pilot training,” Paul said.

After eight years, he got out and the couple started a photography studio.

Paul was recalled during the war in Korea. He had transferred to the Air Force when he was in the reserves in between World War II and the Korean War.

“They made an instructor out of me,” Paul said.

Paul went into B-47 bomber training in Kansas. When that was completed he went to Ohio, where he was on a combat team for several years. From Ohio he went to Morocco. Margaret was with him for every move.

“We took the whole family to Morocco,” Paul said.

Paul’s last base was in Riverside, Calif. He and Margaret moved to Washington about 33 years ago. Their youngest daughter was a nurse in the state. She had married a doctor.

“They kept bugging us to move to Washington,” Paul said.

Paul loves and has the deepest respect for Margaret. She had wanted to go to school to become a doctor. She took pre-med classes in Texas. When the family moved to Ohio, Margaret was told that she was too old and the wrong sex to be a doctor.

“She got into anthropology,” Paul said. “She fell in love with the subject.”

Margaret graduated from the University of California, Riverside. She took one year of classes at graduate school but became ill.

Margaret has been in assisted living and will now move to a hospice in Arlington where Paul is only a few minutes away. He will be able to be there every day.

Paul advises couples starting out to keep going when the road gets rough.

“We’ve had some rough roads and a lot of smoothing out, too,” Paul said. “It hasn’t always been peaches and cream.”

From that cold day in the choir in Indiana to the warmth of their love on their 55th wedding anniversary, Paul knows that there could never have been anyone else for him than Margaret. As he spoke she reached for his hand.

“She’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” Paul said. “We started out in love and we are more in love right now than we have been in our lives.”

For information on Love Story and Celebrations, call Christina Harper at 425-339-3491 or e-mail harper@ heraldnet.com.