Dad’s Practice
Dad came to Remsen hungry and ready to work. We lived in the basement while our house was being remodeled, and Dad rented a small office in Vern Kellen’s feed store.
We came to Remsen on the advice of Dad’s brother Andrew who farmed east of town. Dad’s practice got off to a rough start, however. Two veterinarians in town (Dr. Milan and Dr. Hussey), came to visit in the basement to recommend that Dad practice somewhere else because there just was not enough business for another vet in town. This also appears to have been the consensus of the banks because they would not loan him the money to buy vaccines. You cannot practice veterinary medicine without medicine. Ray Schroeder was one of his first clients. He was impressed by Dad’s work and he was the one who loaned him the money to get started. It was the beginning of a close and enduring friendship with the Schroeder family. Dad was off to work with something to prove.
As soon as his business started to take hold, Mom took over the bookkeeping, the billing, the ordering, mixing drugs, cleaning needles, sterilizing instruments, and answering the phone. When the garage was constructed, Uncle Frank converted part of it into office and kennel space. There was still room in the garage for the family car and the practice car. Clients came to the back door of the house when they wanted to speak in person with Mom or Dad. Blackie Schroeder remarked that Mom was always barefoot and pregnant whenever he stopped at the garage/office. Mom had a lot to do, and things were getting even busier very fast.
We learned a lot from Dad. He let us watch when he operated on animals or performed post-mortems. The portable operating table, folded and stored along the wall in the garage, was brought out and put into service for spaying a dog or setting a puppy’s broken leg. We once watched Dad post a chicken suspected of having coccidiosis, a disease that could easily wipe out a farmer’s flock if left untreated. Dad carefully cut open the chicken’s abdominal cavity, removed its intestines, and with his fingers held it up to the light to do an inch-by-inch visual inspection. And there it was, a 1 ½” long purple bulge. Other times on a call, we would watch him sort through the organs of a pig noting the color of the liver as evidence for a diagnosis. Mostly, we learned that you had to have a strong stomach to be a veterinarian.
Dad was obsessed and would not tell anyone that he did not have the time to help them. Leon Meis called Dad when his pigs contracted erysipelas. He didn’t know when Dad would get there but he knew that he would come as soon as he could. It was 2 a.m. when he arrived. Dad really worked hard. On at least one occasion he simply passed out from exhaustion while talking to a farmer who had come to the back door. He had more work than he could handle. Bob Hahn graduated from high school in 1950. Grandpa Hahn did not have enough work for him at home so he helped Dad for several weeks the following summer. It was a learning experience for Bob. Dad worked 20 hours a day, seven days a week, and lived on cigarettes, coffee, and ice cream.
And, contrary to the projection made by the other vets in town less than four years earlier, Dad’s practice was already in the need of another veterinarian.
Dad had a lot of work to do and he wasted no time on the road. He was a skilled driver with lots of experience who drove very fast. His first practice car was a 1934 Ford V8 which he souped up with high-altitude aluminum pistons. His first new car was a 1948 Chevrolet which was a tremendous disappointment to him and which soured him on General Motors products for the rest of his life. From then on his practice cars were Plymouths with police engines and taxi cab suspensions. The first thing he did when he got a new car was to remove the back seat and install a level floor in the back for his medical bags. The truck held boots, disinfectant, bucket and boot brush, all the odd-shaped equipment, two nylon lariats, and a bulky Motorola radio transmitter/receiver.
Dad got the 2-way radio sometime around 1952. It was federally licensed and was to be used for business purposes only. There was a very tall pole in our backyard with an antenna at the very top. Dad’s car had a whip antenna. In those days, only the highway patrol had 2-ways and Dad often noticed people slowing down when they saw him coming. The base transmitter sat on a triangle shelf between the end of the kitchen counter and the back door. The telephone was on the wall in this same area. It was easy to take a call from a client, keep him on the line, and at the same time call Dad on the 2-way. If Dad was in the car he would answer immediately. Whoever was closest answered the phone when it rang, and if it was a client, we called Dad on the 2-way. We were instructed to use proper 2-way radio procedure and felt pretty important!
Mary: “Calling KAD 993, over.” Dad: “This is KAD 993, over.” Mary: “Dad, George Homan is on the phone. He has a sow that can’t have pigs, over.” Dad: “I’m at Corny Wolf’s place. Tell him I’ll head north to his place as soon as I am finished here, over.” Mary: “OK, over and out.” And so it went...many times over the years. But not always so smoothly, I might add. Dad had two names for sows that had trouble delivering pigs. One was OB sow, which was short for a sow with obstetric problems, and a favorite cuss word for sows, or anything that caused him grief, “SOB.” So when Joan or Barbara had to report to a client needing Dad’s services that he was busy with a problem sow, it was a natural and innocent response to tell them that he was with an “SOB sow.” Do you think the clients figured out where that came from?
The 2-way radio was a Godsend. I remember when it broke and Harry Johnson took a day or two to fix it. It was very helpful and reliable and sorely missed when it didn’t work. Before the radio, many times Dad would get back in town from a call that was way out only to find he had another call from the same area he had just left, and had to go back. OK, maybe those were the times we heard the term “SOB sows.” I remember once Dad being really upset when he just got home and was called back to the same area. He heaved his plastic coffee cup across the kitchen into the living room, got into his practice car, and flew off again.
Having the 2-way allowed him to get more done in the same amount of time, but he was always pressed for time. He drove like a bat out of hell on those old gravel roads but never had an accident. Pretty remarkable I would say, knowing how fast he drove. It was a real thrill when we rode along on a call. Dad drove over those old wood plank bridges making it feel like we were on a high-flying roller coaster ride. The farmers knew it was Doc Pick coming by the roar of his engine and the cloud of dust in the air. He never had an accident but he got plenty of tickets, mostly for running stop signs. If he did not see dust on a road crossing with a stop sign, he would just blow through it at full speed. He was so predictable that one farmer painted “Doc” under the word STOP on one sign. On one Christmas Day, he came home and announced that he had just gotten a Christmas present, another ticket. He told the story of once pulling into a farm yard, and just as he had his boots on, a highway patrolman came roaring up with his siren blaring and lights flashing. “Boy, did I have a hard time catching you,” he said. Dad didn’t tell him that he didn’t even know he was behind him. Ordinarily, a person would lose their license for getting as many tickets as he did, but Iowa law stipulated that if the license was needed to make a living that it could not be revoked for these offenses.
Dad was not someone who could be held hostage for any length of time by a farm dog either. It was not all that rare for him to arrive at a farm with no one home except the dog which could be expected to protect his territory. Dad carried cherry bombs in the glove compartment for situations like this. If a dog would not let him out of the car, he would get out the fireworks, roll down the window a bit, and light it off his cigarette and drop it out the window. The sound of the fuse burning down would mean nothing to the dog, until the bomb went off under its feet. Then it would go yelping off leaving Dad to take care of the sick animals. And, the next time he came to the same farm with no one around, all he had to do was to roll down the window a bit and hiss, and the dog would go yelping off.
As the family and practice grew, there was an undeniable need for more help. Ed Henrich spent the summers of 1952 and 1953 working for Dad while Ed was in vet school. After graduating, Ed came back to work full-time in August 1956. That same fall, when Ralph Augustine came to work for Dad as the office manager, the 2-way radio went out to the garage which Frank had converted into an office. That put Mom out of one job. About time I’d say. I don’t know how she managed everything. At that time she was in her 10th pregnancy.
It was about this time that Dad joined 99 other veterinarians to form a drug company called Diamond Laboratories. They started just manufacturing vaccines, with Dad’s practice being the company’s best customer. They soon branched out into producing a wide range of drugs for animals until they were bought out by Syntex.
Virgil Bohnenkamp also spent one or two summers working for Dad and came back full time in 1958, at which time a partnership was formed. I remember the meetings with the lawyer and the paperwork Dad kept on top of his chest of drawers in his upstairs bedroom.
It was in 1957 that Dad built the clinic on Highway 3. I remember it being built, a solid building with poured reinforced concrete joists, steel beams, and terrazzo floors. It required a lot of steel. Dad and Jack Thiel were pretty tight until Dad bought the steel for the clinic from a lower bidder. Remsen still is a small town. What a big deal the clinic was for Dad. He bought a mural by Grandma Moses to hang on the wall alongside Ralph’s desk, right next to the 2-way radio.
Dale Drum joined the group in 1959. Thirteen years after that basement visit from Drs. Hussey and Milan, there was yet another vet in town.
The Diamond Labs venture was not the last time Dad joined others in order to make things better. In 1960 he formed a group of Plymouth County veterinarians that opened a Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) facility in Remsen called Veterinarian Laboratory, Inc. Dr. Ross was hired to run the facility. The purpose was to produce the initial breeding stock that would create generations of pigs free of the major germs that reduced growth by as much as 30%. The pathogens are normally introduced to newborn pigs at birth by contact with the sow. This contact was circumvented by delivering the pigs by Cesarean section and placing them individually in stainless steel incubators where they were fed formula until they met their litter mates for the first time in group incubators when they were three weeks old. At six weeks of age, after an entire life in a germ-free environment, they were introduced to fresh air and became sick for a couple of days. From the lab the baby pigs were transported to sanitized facilities on farms where they reproduced naturally, remaining free of the specific germs for generations as long as they had no exposure to infected carriers.
Ideally, a SPF lab would have a limited life span. When herds were firmly established, there would be no need for the first-generation procedure. Soon after Dad’s lab opened, virtually every county in Iowa and Nebraska had a lab. Dad’s lab ceased operation after 17 months of operation (March 1961 – July 1962). Unfortunately, it proved impossible to prevent a herd from being exposed through contact with bird dropping, stray animals, or farm personnel not following proper hygiene. Genetics proved to be a much better solution to the problem. Hogs today were bred to be resistant to these same pathogens.
Dad was in the clinic sawing the skull of a dog suspected of having rabies when the saw slipped and nicked Dad’s finger. The histology showed that the dog was indeed infected and he had to go through the 14-shot anti-rabies regimen that made him so ill he couldn’t leave the house. Except for the time in the early 50’s when he had a serious kidney infection, we’d never seen our Dad so incapacitated. He spent the entire summer in bed. Dad retired and sold his practice to Ed, Virgil, and Dale that same year. We moved to the farm in April 1960 and Ralph left the clinic soon after Dad left the practice. Donnell Engelbrecht was hired to take his place. Ralph said Dad was the finest person he ever worked for.
(This story was co-authored by Doc’s two oldest children, Mary as secondary author and David as primary author.)
