Phthursday Musings: Doc and the Veterinary Hospital

Doc passed away last Friday. To friends and family he was Gene, his full name was Loren Eugene Gambrel, but the entire town simply knew him as Doc, because he was the town veterinarian for 55 years.

For those of you who might remember, here’s his obituary.

Doc was my very first boss. I started working at the veterinary hospital at the beginning of my junior year of high school. The job had been handed over to me from my friend Sjoerd who was off to college, and in turn when it was time for me to go, I handed it over to my stepsister Wilhelmina. Doc must have had scores of different high school students working for him over all those years, and I suspect they all had Dutch names like Sjoerd or Wilhelmina.

Doc was the quintessential pillar of the community. His entire career of over 50 years was spent in Winnebago and his practice covered pets and farm animals alike. His wife Annie was always around the hospital. He had his own dog - Polly, a golden retriever - and his brother would drop in regularly with his dog - Sandy, Polly’s sister. It was all so tight-knit that the hospital manager actually lived above the hospital.

I can’t think of anyone in my life who was more of a Norman Rockwell figure than Doc: a really good guy, an important pillar of the community, friendly but could still be stern.

I had the morning shift. Before school, I would go in to take care of the animals who were at the hospital overnight. Some of them were there because of surgery recovery, some of them were there because Doc also did boarding… a very simplified version of boarding. Cats and small dogs were in brick cubicles about 3 feet square. Big dogs were in caged enclosures in the back.

I would let the big dogs out through pulleyed doors into enclosures where they would do their business. Small dogs I’d have to lead out on a collar. These were longer runs, fenced and covered, but concrete. Dogs never came into contact with one another, so this wasn’t quite what a doggy daycare situation. I’d feed them outdoors and usually they’d promptly eat, and then once they were inside I’d go back with a garden hose and spray what they left behind down the drain. If the drain was frozen over, I’d just have to attack the ice with the hose.

The dogs were more work, but the cats were the bigger pains in the ass. They’d get fresh litter and food every morning, but to facilitate this required moving them from one cage to another, and if you know cats, you know that a human wanting a cat to go somewhere does not mean that the cat is on board with the idea. There were very thick gloves in the cat room for such situations, probably sufficient for handling most machinery, though barely adequate for handling the feistiest felines.

A typical morning, I’d have about one hour of work to do. I’d arrive at 6:30 and make it to school in plenty of time for the 8:15 start. I also worked every other weekend, both the morning and afternoon shifts. One of my classmates had the afternoon shift and the alternating weekends, and we also took turns mowing. That was the only situation where I ever had occasion to use a riding mower.

It was a low-key, mostly low-stress job, aside from the occasional major mess a dog created in a cage. It paid $5.00/hour. It was an ideal starter job, and Doc was an ideal starter boss.

It’s one of the odd things about living one’s life… Doc was a good guy but when I went off to college, I never had occasion to be back at the hospital. It’s weird to think about how even good people can so easily flow through your life. I’ve got a longer piece coming up that’s also rooted in the same time frame as when I worked at the hospital, and what occurs to me is that I was pretty keen on just not being in or around Winnebago once I’d gone off to college.

I’m heartened that Doc lived a long, rich life. He and Annie were married for 69 years. I’m deeply appreciative of the opportunity to have worked for him.

Rest in peace, Dr. Gambrel. You were one of the good ones.

Maybe the craziest thing about having that job was that, as a high school junior and senior, I got up extra early every day. At no other time in my life have I ever gotten up extra early for anything!

Early on my dad would actually drive me over in the morning with my bike in the back of the car. Then I’d bike on to school. The hospital was on the other side of Winnebago Corners, where Winnebago Road crosses U.S. 20. It’s a four lane divided highway, not really the most ideal thing to cross on a bike, though there was a center divider so you only had to cross one direction at a time.

Immediately after crossing there was a gas station. The thing is that while I got up early, I don’t think I ever ate first thing in the morning, I just left the house immediately. This meant I often went to that gas station ans got something, and, yes, this meant that a not uncommon breakfast was a 20oz glass bottle of Mello Yello and a 3 Musketeers bar. I cannot explain how this possibly worked except that, when you’re young, your body will let you get away with a hell of a lot.

Three months in, I turned 16, got my license, and got a 1979 Pontiac Phoenix to drive. There’s a lot that could be said about that car, but I’ll limit it here to how the radio buttons didn’t work right, and it was hard to tune, so I picked one radio station and stuck with it, and that was WXRX. So I’d actually be in the car for a little ways during the WXRX morning show when they played things which for whatever reason didn’t get played so much the rest of the day, and in steady morning rotation that fall was “Waiting for the Sun” by the Jayhawks. There was enough of a buzz around them then that they even got on Letterman:

Back then, the only Walkman I had was for cassettes, and on the weekends where it was my turn to mow, mowing took a while. I didn’t have a whole lot of rock cassettes at the time, but I distinctly remember have a copy of Peter Gabriel’s So in mowing rotation, and the most played current album-on-cassette in my collection was, of course, Automatic for the People.

Perhaps the most “important” mowing discovery was during the summer of 1993. I might have the sequencing a little off but I distinctly remember that it was while listening to WXRX and on the mower that I first really noticed a “new alternative band” thanks to the lead single off their new album:

I’ve written about UO before so I won’t rehash too much here… “Sister Havana” is pretty dumb, but it’s the right kind of dumb, and I found that I was into something which nobody else around me was as into, and I think it was a key inflection point for me in my evolving sense of myself. And I still associate it with riding around on a lawn mower at the veterinary hospital.

I thought that to stay a bit on theme I would see if there were any official flags out there prominently featuring dogs. So many heraldic lions, so there’s got to be dogs, right?

Friends, our Phthursday flag is that of Gieten, Netherlands:

Gieten is a village of 5,000 people in Drenthe province in the northeast of the country. But it is no longer a municipality, it’s now part of Aa en Hunze. What does all this mean? It’s Dutch to me.

There’s frankly not a lot of useful information about Gieten out there. They don’t even know where they name came from. We are therefore left to wildly speculate as to why their flag is of a greyhound attempting to escape a festering eddy. The greyhound also appears on their coat of arms, so I suppose that’s a clue, but the colors are different and no maelstrom is present there.

In Dutch the breed is known as windhond, literally “wind dog”, so that’s cool. So maybe this is not a whirlpool but rather a vortex which the windhond is escaping.

My simple guess is that the dog was a preexisting symbol of the area and just got schlapped onto something someone dreamt up whilst high on hashish. But it’s more fun to imagine that there was a Gieten Tourbillon at some point that the village survived because an intrepid windhond raced through town saving people, so I’m going with that.

Apropos of… that… here is the Dave Holland Quintet live in Freiburg in 1986 performing “Vortex”!

I’m pleased to see the hospital is still around, now the Winnebago Animal Clinic. I like it when things like that don’t change too much.

I noted above I’ve been working on a different piece about Winnebago, which I hope to release in the next few days. It’s been an odd confluence of thoughts about the old home town recently. It feels so very far away, and yet just over the weekend I was listening to Saturation and that didn’t feel nearly so removed to the past.

I’m sure part of it is that our resident goofus started sixth grade today. The first day of school always gets my mind meandering to when I was in school myself in a different millenniiummmm.

One of these years I’m going to get to a race in Winnebago. 16 year old me would have never dreamt of such a thing, even if I’d been well-fueled by whipped nougat.

Anyone still in or around Winnebago actually reading this madness? Maybe it’s high time I paid a visit, race or no. Who’s in?