Great story from Missoula, Montana:
'Totally floored': Ronan woman given 1969 Ford Mustang she bought at 15 for her 50th birthday
Julie Moore was pretty sure her 50th birthday was going to slip by with little fanfare.
Her son Bill, an X-ray technician at Community Medical Center in Missoula, was scheduled to work, and her daughter, Jeri Rice, lives far away in Fayetteville, Ark., with husband Steve.
Besides, Julie and her husband Willard had been busy planning another celebration, the 30th anniversary of their purchase of Willard's, their downtown bar, for Friday. That was tempered by the death of a dear friend, longtime Ronan teacher William 'Pat' Williams; the Moores served as ushers at his funeral last Saturday morning, then joined others at the Mission Mountain Country Club to hit golf balls on Williams' favorite hole in his memory.
Several of them retired to Willard's after that, and it was around 8:30 p.m. when Julie heard a familiar voice.
"Mom! Mom!" Bill Moore hollered as he entered Willard's. Julie turned; she was surprised to see her son.
And more stunned as the crowd parted and she saw who was with him: her own mother, Vivienne Hunter; her dad, Ron Hunter; her stepmother, Jewell Hunter.
Her brother Reed and his girlfriend, Ginny Cogswell, were there, too. Most shocking of all: Jeri and Steve had flown in from Arkansas to surprise her.
"With the bar's birthday and the passing of a friend, I thought I'd let my birthday kind of slide by this year," Julie says. "There was no such luck with this crew."
But the biggest surprise wasn't that they were all here.
It was what they brought with them.
Bill Moore blindfolded his mother, twirled her around and pushed her toward the back door of the bar.
Once outside, the blindfold was lifted and there in front of Julie was her birthday present: a red 1969 Ford Mustang fastback.
And not just any '69 Mustang fastback. It was the same Mustang Julie had purchased when she was 15 years old, back in 1973 when she was a sophomore at Sentinel High School, as her first car.
"I just about fainted," Julie says. "I was totally floored."
It was Bill Moore who found the Mustang, covered in pitch and sitting in disrepair under a pine tree in a Missoula backyard. He'd run into the man who bought it from his mother 10 years ago, and told the owner if he ever wanted to sell it, to give him first crack at it.
Julie's son, daughter and mother banded together to buy it back. Bill did much of the work over the winter to get it up and running again, but more family and friends came on board to help as time went on.
"I think maybe the biggest surprise of all is that so many people were able to keep it a secret for so long," Julie says.
Now that will be a birthday that will be remembered down many generations of that family.
