Scott Swanson
When Dr. David and Sandy Larsen arrived in Sweet Home to open a veterinary practice, it was a different era.
Forty years ago, in 1976, and there were “eight or nine mills” in town. A lot of business was done with a handshake.
The Larsens, barely a year out of veterinary medicine school, were looking for a place to settle down after a year and a half in Enumclaw, Wash.
Now, after four decades, both are 71. They say it’s time to retire.
Back in those early days, they’d grown up together in Myrtle Point, graduating in the same high school class, Sandy said.
“But we didn’t date until we were in our mid-20s.”
In the meantime, David had begun studying engineering at Oregon Institute of Technology, decided to transfer Colorado State University to pursue pre-veterinary medicine, then transferred to Southwestern Oregon Community College and dropped out after a quarter because he’d been accepted to Oregon State University.
Within two weeks of leaving SWOCC, though, he was drafted. So he joined the Army, serving four years in Korea and West Germany in military intelligence.
“My first two years of school were dismal, grade-wise,” David said. “I would never have gotten into school. Going into the Army allowed me to explain away those two years.
“I had nothing but favorable experien-ces in the military – but people forget that some guys don’t come home,” he added.
Out of the service, he finished a degree in zoology at OSU in 1971, then returned to Colorado State, since Oregon had no veterinary medicine programs at the time. He said Oregon had an arrangement in which veterinary medicine students would pay in-state tuition at Colorado State and Colorado sent its dental students to Oregon.
After graduating from veterinary school in March 1975, David initially intended to work with cows, which was the focus of the practice in Enumclaw, he said.
“I grew up on a dairy farm and I wanted to be a dairy practitioner. But the dang telephone rang every morning at 3 a.m. I couldn’t do that. I’m not a morning person.
“I did everything for a while. I was never really a horse doctor but I did horses until 1987. I had to give up cows (in 2003) just because my joints were becoming a problem. I’m kind of a cow doctor at heart, still.”
The Larsens also decided they needed to be closer to their families in Myrtle Point.
“I drew a 10-mile radius around every veterinarian in the state and started looking for holes,” David said. “We made a list of eight or 10 towns. Sweet Home was the one with probably the most population. We came down here spring break to look things over. We were going to visit four or five of those towns. We never got past Sweet Home.”
In March of 1976 the Larsens and their four children arrived in Sweet Home for a visit.
“ I stopped at the bank – Citizens Valley Bank, I think – and spoke briefly with the manager, Ron Gage.
“Ron listens to me for less than a minute and says ‘I never thought of it before, but this town needs a veterinarian.’ He makes a phone call and sends me out to Clear Lumber Company to talk with Jim Stock. That was the end of the story.”
Stock owned the Santiam Shopping Center and other local properties.
“I spend 10 or 15 minutes talking with Jim and we jump in a pickup and drive downtown to look at potential sites for a clinic. In less than an hour we agree on a clinic location, construction schedule and preliminary lease terms. We shake hands on the deal. With that handshake I make the move to Sweet Home and Stocks start construction on the clinic.
We did not formalize an agreement until mid-November. Today that kind of transaction would be unheard of; it would have taken weeks to make an agreement to get started and I likely would have ended up somewhere else.”
They moved to Sweet Home on June 13, 1976, a month after their son’s birth, and David set up shop in a garage on Ames Creek Drive. They moved into “the last two-bedroom apartment in town,” behind A&W.
“Sweet Home was a different town in those days,” he said. “We had young families all over the place. I worked for young families and we had kids crawling all over the clinic all the time. Now, we work for old folks, predominantly. We certainly don’t see the numbers of kids we used to see.”
David remembers one of his first cases, a springer spaniel owned by the Seig family, which had come into contact with the strychnine poison used commonly in those days to control coyotes – or unwanted dogs, he said.
“I had to sedate him long enough to let him work through it,” David recalled, “so I brought the dog in and kept him in the bathtub of the apartment overnight.”
They moved into the newly built clinic on Dec. 7, 1976 setting up shop in a location now occupied by the Safeway store. They were there for _______ years before moving to their present location at 1214 Long St.
“There are some good memories, some bad,” David said of his 40½ years operating the clinic.
He recalls the 12-foot Burmese python he treated in the early 1990s that had been bitten in the head by its dinner – an uncooperative rabbit.
“None of the (veterinary assistant) girls would go near it,” he remembered.
“They all lined up behind him,” Sandy said.
“They brought this 12-foot snake in that weighed – 75 pounds? It was big,” David continued. “We had two big guys pulling that snake out of a dog crate. It didn’t want to come out. It came about half out of the crate and I’m wondering, ‘What are we going to do with this snake?’”
“It got mad,” Sandy said. “I told him, ‘If you’re going to treat snakes, I’m not working here.’”
David said he has enjoyed working with the many and varied exotic animal species owned by the late Frank McCubbins at his ranch at the top of Ames Creek Drive.
“That kept things interesting,” he said.
Another favorite memory was a trip to local rancher Walt Nelson’s place on Fairview Road, where Nelson was known for using draft horses to cut hay along Highway 20, David said.
“I was doing surgery on this little steer; he has a stone in his urethra. We had to take that stone out. To get it out, we had the steer tied down and a rope came loose. He kicked all the stuff helter-skelter all over the place – the surgery instruments and what not. I was trying to keep things clean and get things picked up.
“Walt he’d seen where that stone got knocked, and he crawled over in that straw and pulled that stone out. He’d never seen anything like it. He wanted to have that to show.
“Those are the easy stories.”
There were hard times, particularly in 1980s when the spotted owl-related prohibitions on logging began.
“We sort of tried to go status quo for a little while,” David said. “We went too long. Had a hard struggle digging ourselves out of the hole.”
“We wrote a lot of health certificates for people going through Canada to Alaska,” said Sandy. “And then, probably 10 or 15 years ago, lot of those same people moved back home.”
Veterinary medicine has changed a lot during their time in Sweet Home, primarily thanks to technology. Computers have made it possible for the clinic to triple its volume. But there have been costs with that, David said.
“Technology has passed me by; there’s so much available. I was telling an MD the other day that I practice with my fingertips. And she said, ‘Yeah, and nobody does that any more, even in medicine.
“The technology has been good, but some of the art of clinical exam, that kind of thing, is being lost.
“Yeah, it’s still fun, the way I practice. I suspect veterinary medicine is going to get to be a lot like human medicine as far as the practitioners go. The new practitioners are under far more economic pressure than I was, ever. The student loan debt is dragging this profession down really hard. If we don’t get that issue solved, I don’t know what’s going to come of things.
“When I was in school, they had a practitioner come by and lecture us on financial stuff in the practice. The tip he gave us was to stand in front of the mirror and practice saying, ‘The fee is $100.’
“And when we came to Sweet Home, that was pretty accurate. If we could fix something for 100 bucks, we could fix it. If we couldn’t, it was not going to get fixed. That $100 fee is a thing of the past.”
Now that they’re calling it quits, the Larsens say they’ll take some trips and work on some projects, maybe do some fishing. Their four children, all of whom graduated from OSU, and nine grandchildren all live within driving distance
Brenda (King, 1985 Sweet Home High School graduate) lives in Portland, where she’s an information technology executive with Freightliner; Amy (Baird, 1990) lives in Albany and is a social worker at Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis; Dr. Delaine (Dee) Larsen (1991) is a neuroscience researcher at the University of California, San Francisco; and Derek Larsen (1994) is a structural engineer in Beaverton.
Despite the changes in the way they do business and the demographics of their customer base, the Larsens say some things haven’t changed much.
“We see a lot of third-generation clients. I’m not sure if we have any fourth-generation clients,” David said. The customer service aspect is clearly something he’s enjoyed.
“Everybody thinks that veterinary medicine is about pets. But it’s about people,” he added, voice cracking slightly. “I’ll miss that.”
The Larsens are selling their practice to Drs. Michael Reynolds and Jeffrey Brubaker of the Stayton Veterinary Hospital.
“It’s going to be a direct continuum,” David said. “They’ll be open on the 22nd. It’s a good thing.
“I’m from a different generation.”