MTA's Koon announces Sept. 30 retirement
By Cole Boehler
"It's the best job I ever had."
So said Montana Tavern Association Executive Director Diana Koon in a June 9 interview with the Montana Tavern Times, shortly after her Sept. 30 retirement was announced.
Koon spent the last nine years at the helm of the MTA executive operations, following in the path of the late, venerable 30-year executive director Marie Durkee.
While Durkee was regarded as a crack-the-whip high-profile fighter, Koon said rather she sought to quietly and smoothly bring office operations into the 21st Century technologically, and said she feels she succeeded, with internal functions now computer aided in all facets.
"The office has been modernized, is more efficient and more cost-effective. We're able to do a lot more in-house, such as pamphlets, brochures, posters and so on. We also got a web site set up," she said.
"The procedures are in place. My successor should be able to transition in without much trouble."
Koon said she's proud of the MTA's financial situation, too.
"We've been through eight audits and in every case our records were found to be squeaky clean," she said, adding, "The budget process and reports are far more accessible to membership and the Budget Committee, I think. It's all very up-to-date—practically minute-to-minute. We're very careful with the money. And we're in the black."
In turn, she said the MTA has been "very, very good to me. I hadn't worked in the private sector for more than 20 years and now wonder why I'd waited so long.
"The people in the MTA are so appreciative and uncritical. They're very easy to work with. And the members work so hard themselves, then they volunteer to work for MTA and spend their own money to do it. They are fun and kind people and they treat you with affection, like you're family. I've made many, many good friends."
Association Prtesident Dennis White told the Tavern Times, "We're going to miss Diana's expertise. She's one of the few who can quote the Montana (law) Code by heart, and that's been a great asset. I've enjoyed working with her. She's always been very responsive.
"She's going to leave a hole to fill," White said, "...big shoes. I wish her the best in her well deserved retirement; she's had a couple of rough years (losing her husband to illness). But we're looking forward to beginning a new era with her succesor."
MTA Government Affairs Counsel Mark Staples lamented Koon's leaving.
"I'm happy for Diana that she'll have more time for herself and her family, but sad for her MTA family—including me—that's she's hanging it up," he said.
"I've worked with Diana since she was at the Department of Revenue. She always reminds me of the song 'Smooth Operator.' She's been pretty unflappable and that's hard to be when you have 800 bosses. She's kept the trains running on time and has always done it with a relaxed sense of humor.
"I think the real question at the end of any job is, 'Did you leave it better than you found it?' Diana took over MTA from a legend, Marie Durkee, which made it a tough deal," Staples said. "Yet, she took Marie's baton hand-off and never broke stride and neither did MTA; in fact it's grown.
"You can't say anything but 'Job well done, Diana.' Thanks for everything."
Koon said one of her sharpest recollections of her tenure was soloing and pulling off her first MTA convention. "And one of the best days of the year is the Thursday morning business meeting (as the convention winds down), because at that point I know everything has gone pretty well."
She also remembers her second convention when the humorous musical entertainment group Ringling Five called on her in the audience to mimic specific animal sounds, only one of which she got right, saying "quack quack" when asked to mimic a chicken, for example.
"It was certainly some stage fright" that had her discombobulated, she admits, but then adds with a laugh, "I'm a city girl; I didn't know what farm animals sound like. The only one I got right was the cow."
Koon was born in Seattle. Her mother was a bookkeeper and her father a civil engineer with the federal government, which had the family relocating from time to time—even to the Fort Peck area for work on the dam.
But they landed in Edmonds, Wash., where Koon graduated high school. At college in Bozeman, she met her future husband, Bill, and the two were married as Bill was drafted and stationed in the Oakland, Calif. area. Koon worked for a valve manufacturing company as a receptionist, then worked for a telephone company.
Late in Bill's army hitch he was transferred to Worms, Germany. Diana went along and got to see much of Europe, often in the company of other military wives.
They returned to Montana where Bill earned his undergraduate and masters degree from MSU. Diana earned a bachelor’s in modern languages and later, while working for the Montana Department of Revenue in Helena, earned her masters in public administration from the University of Montana.
While with DOR, she worked in the Research and Information Bureau, then as a compliance specialist in liquor licensing, then became the bureau chief, holding that post 16 years before joining MTA.
Meanwhile, the couple reared two kids: son Chad, now 39 and a major in the National Guard and just back from Kuwait, and Dana, a massage therapist. Koon has a granddaughter, Ryan Isabella, who is Chad's and is seven and one-half years of age.
Bill, her husband of 43 years, passed away in late November last year from the effects of diabetes, coronary and respiratory disease, a life altering event for sure.
"My sister, who was two years older than me, and I always planned to go to Hawaii. But she died suddenly at age 60. We never got to go," Koon says wistfully.
"If we wait to do it later, later may not come. I just don't want to wait anymore," she said. "I've decided I want to visit my family, do some traveling, take my grandaughter around the country to visit her cousins, learn to ride a bike all over again... I want to do a few more things while I'm healthy and able. Maybe I'll be impulsive," she says with a chuckle.
"I just bought a condo so don't have to keep up a house and yard anymore; the timing was right."
"I wanted to leave while I was still enthusiastic about the job, though if I was going to keep working, it would surely be for the MTA. I like the work and the people and will miss both."
She said MTA will start to advertise the position immediately.
Source: The Montana Tavern Times, July 2009, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W Granite, Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.