RONAN - This started out as a feature story about the Ronan Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner and the 82-year-old woman, Marie Cowen, who started it a dozen years ago.

When you walk through the door of Cowen's home, however, it's hard to see the turkeys for the bears.

Cowen, it turns out, has been collecting teddy bears for 15 years, buying most of them at garage sales, and to say she's taken her hobby seriously doesn't begin to cover it.

The bears are everywhere in Cowen's little home off Terrace Lake Road east of town, every shape, size and color you can imagine, on virtually every shelf, table and wall in the place - somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 of them, she estimates.

"If you want to count them, go ahead," she says.

She and a granddaughter once tried, beginning with the teddy bears in Cowen's bedroom.

"When we got to 2,100, I said, ‘Enough,' " Cowen says.

They weren't even done with the first room.

She wanted to start collecting 15 years ago, and had a reason for doing so. But what she wanted to collect, she didn't know.

Cowen says she was rummaging through items at a garage sale one day when she stumbled on a cardboard box filled with stuffed teddy bears and a sign - 25 cents apiece.

"I said, ‘I think I'll try bears,' " she says. "There can't be that many kinds, and I only want one of each."

Seven thousand to 8,000 mostly different bears later - just a few of the bears were purchased as sets of twins - and Cowen can tell you there seems to be no limit to the varieties of teddy bears in the world.

But, like we said, this began as a story about the Ronan Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner Cowen started in 1997, and that story is as interesting as her overflowing teddy bear collection.

Cowen was born in St. Ignatius, but was taken from the Flathead Indian Reservation in 1935 as a 9-year-old and placed in a boarding school in South Dakota.

"They wanted to make a white woman out of me," she says, but adds that she loved the school. She returned to the reservation, married young, but her third child was born prematurely and with polio. Doctors told Cowen and her husband the girl needed a moister climate, so the family moved to Oregon.

Cowen lived in Portland for 47 years, and didn't make her way home to Montana until the 1990s.

She opened Marie's Café - now the Ronan Café - in 1997.

"I was old enough to retire when I started it," says the grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother of four, and that first year she decided to cook up a free Thanksgiving dinner for some of her customers.

"There were probably 25 or 30 people I figured had no place to go," she explains, "so I put up a sign."

Cowen says there was a blizzard that first Thanksgiving, when she bought three turkeys big enough to feed 35 people in case a few more showed up than she expected.

A few more?

"They were lined up around the block," she says. "I ran out of turkey and trimmings real fast. We were down to licking the bottom of the bowls. I turned on the grill, and made hamburgers for everyone else. I don't know how many people we had that first year, but it was well over 150."

The unexpected response not only didn't deter Cowen, it convinced her that a lot of people didn't have anywhere to go over the holidays.

So a month later, Cowen did it again, offering a free Christmas dinner - and this time cooking half a dozen turkeys and two or three hams, as well as everything else, from salads to pies.

She did both again the following year, but the dinners became so popular they got to be too much for her.

"They were just too close together, and too much work," she says, "so I dropped the Thanksgiving dinner, and just did Christmas for the next seven years. By the last one, I knew how old I was getting. I'm glad I'm short, because my bottom's close to the floor for when it hits the ground."

On her last holiday dinner - the event had long since been moved to a community center - Cowen served more than 900 people.

She spent a week making all the salads, potatoes and pies, cooked 19 "huge" turkeys - the largest one a 49-pound bird, donated by an area farmer, that required a custom-built baking tray - and 17 hams.

"People don't have family around like they used to," Cowen says. "Their kids grow up and move out of state because we don't have the work here. I think it's the loneliness that gets to them. Really, I think they mostly came for the companionship. I could have served them bread and water, and they still would have enjoyed it."

But - the cheeseburgers on that first Thanksgiving notwithstanding - a complete holiday meal they always got.

In return, Marie Cowen got the memories.

There was the father who showed up with three small children one Christmas Day.

"The kids were all so neat and clean," Cowen says. "I asked them, ‘Was Santa Claus good to you?' "

Their heads, she says, all dropped. One of them softly told her, "Santa Claus didn't come to our house this year."

Their father pulled Cowen aside and explained. Their mother had abandoned the children three or four days earlier, and they had been placed in foster homes. The father, who lived in Washington, had come to get them as quickly as he could, and had arrived Dec. 25. Someone at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Headquarters told him if he wanted to feed the kids that day, Marie Cowen was the woman to find.

"I felt this high," says Cowen - who only stands 4-foot-10 1/2 as it is. ("I like that half-inch," she says later. "I need it.")

"Well, I was about ready to cry," she goes on. "I passed the hat, and everybody donated money to help them get home. Then we packed them a big lunch to take with them."

Somehow, she also found a toy for each child.

A few years later, Cowen was walking down the street in Ronan. She kept hearing someone call her name, but when she turned, she saw no one she recognized.

Finally, the man caught up to her. It was the father of the children.

"He gave me a big hug, and told me that was the best Christmas they ever had," she says. "The kids never forgot it."

Those are the stories that kept Cowen going. But as the crowds approached 1,000 and Cowen approached the age of 80, she decided it was time to retire.

Others eventually stepped in and revived the community Thanksgiving feed Cowen had started back in 1997. This Thursday, the Ronan Community Volunteers and Ronan Area Chamber of Commerce expect several hundred people for dinner at the Ronan Community Center.

Back to the bears, which you can't ignore, even while Cowen talks turkey.

She may not know how many bears she has, but she knows every bear she has.

"You lose your key?" she asked a grandson one day.

Indeed, the boy had, and had hoisted himself through his grandmother's bedroom window to get back in the house.

"How'd you know?" he asked.

"You knocked some bears off the shelf when you climbed through my window," she told him.

"But I put them all back," he protested.

"Not," Cowen said, "in the right order."

Move a single bear - and sometimes her children do, just to mess with her - and Cowen will know it. When neighborhood children bring friends over to show them the collection, the kids warn their pals not to be tempted to sneak one out with them because "the bear lady" will know if even the smallest one has gone missing.

The stuffed teddy bears, Cowen discovered, also serve as remarkable insulation. Her house stays toasty warm, and the loudest party or siren outside can't be heard inside.

The teddy bear collection has its genesis in a sad story. Cowen lost two of her five children in 1999, both to alcohol and drugs. Diana died in January of that year; John in September.

The idea to start collecting something - anything - had been born five years earlier, Cowen says, as a mother-daughter project she hoped would give Diana a new focus.

"It was so hard to watch her kill herself with booze," Cowen says, and while Diana did join in the hobby, she didn't quit drinking.

Her surviving children wonder what they'll do with the thousands of bears once Cowen is gone.

"My son Bill asked, ‘What are we supposed to do with these when you die?' " Cowen says. "I told him, ‘I'm going to leave them all to you, for all the mean things you did to me when you were young.' "

That, one hopes, is a long ways off. Meantime, Marie Cowen remains either the easiest, or hardest, woman in the world to shop for.

Easy? Just get her a teddy bear.

Hard?

It has to be one she doesn't already own.

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or vdevlin@missoulian.com.