Benny Westcott
Retired veterinarian David E. Larsen says he started writing 20 years ago.
But the stories he puts on the page started taking shape long before that.
Fifty short stories from Larsen’s four decades of veterinary practice in Sweet Home are included in his first published book, “The Last Cow in the Chute,” which was made available to the public on April 1. It is published by Wiley Creek Publications, which Larsen and some of his acquaintances recently set up themselves.
Larsen started writing as a casual hobby.
“Then I started getting a little bit more serious about it and talked to a few people, and they suggested I do a blog,” he said.
He’s been writing on that blog, docsmemoirs.com, for close to two years now. Shortly after starting the blog, Larsen also started submitting stories to The New Era, where they appear once a month, usually in the last edition of each month.
The blog gave him good fodder for his first book, and he intends to publish three more by the end of the year.
“I just had a lot of stuff collected and I put it together in a more substantial form,” Larsen said.
He said that one book is going to go a bit farther back in time, before he lived in Sweet Home, chronicling stories from his childhood, high school and his four years in the Army.
Larson grew up on a farm in the Coquille River Valley of southwestern Oregon, near Myrtle Point.
Veterinary medicine was always part of his upbringing to some degree, he said.
“It was always in my thoughts. I wasn’t a good student but I did well at school because it was very easy for me.”
He did well enough to get into Oregon State University. Halfway through his undergraduate studies, he left to serve in the Army for four years.
“I didn’t really have the maturity to go to school and do what needed to be done to get into veterinary school, which is pretty difficult, until I spent four years in the Army,” he said.
His time in the armed forces served as a wake-up call.
“I had a friend that didn’t come home. So then you realize that there’s worse things to be doing than going to school.”
Larsen returned to Corvallis, graduating from Oregon State with a degree in zoology two years after he left the military.
“It takes maturity to accomplish things sometimes,” he said.
He then attended Colorado State University, where he received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree in 1975 at the age of 30.
With a growing family, he moved first to Enumclaw, Wash., before moving to Sweet Home and starting the Sweet Home Veterinary Clinic, where he practiced for over 40 years until he retired about four years ago.
Larsen said he has never regretted making the choice to move to Sweet Home, and that there are a lot of similarities between Myrtle Point and Sweet Home in “the people, the community, and the industry.”
He said that virtually all of the stories that he writes are about local people.
“Most of those are disguised, some better than others, probably,” he said.
Larsen says he “delves into a wee bit of fiction on some of the stories just to enhance the storytelling.”
The basis of the stories are all real events, but some of the dialogue is fiction because he has difficulty remembering exact conversations.
“I think most of it is entertainment more than anything else,” Larsen said. “The first story in the book sets the tone. It’s a story that starts off with a call at 3 in the morning, which is pretty standard fare for large animal veterinarians.”
Larsen said the hardest part of veterinary practice for him was “I’m not a morning person. Those 3 a.m. calls were always pretty rough.”
“A small-town professional practice, particularly in the years when you’re practicing by yourself, is more of a lifestyle than anything else,” he added. “The hours and the difficulties in making plans that you can keep are probably the hardest parts.”
“The kids had to put up with a phone call ruining weekend plans.”
Larsen said he was ready to retire four years ago. He was 71 years old and had practiced for nearly 42 years.
“It was time for me to retire, due to my age, and keeping up with the pace of things, keeping yourself current, that all is difficult.”
“I miss the people a little bit more than the work,” he said. But he noted that he talks to folks downtown much more now than he did when he was practicing.
“People will come up and talk with me,” he said.
He lives in retirement with his wife, Sandy. “We enjoy retirement. Up until this last year, we did a little bit of traveling, and we have a lot of stuff going on. So it’s been a good four years for us.”
Larsen says he pens most of his stories in the evening, and that he doesn’t find writing difficult. His stories are fairly short, usually only spanning a few pages. “I can write one story in an evening with no trouble.”
“I would have difficulty writing a novel,” he said. “I’m not that type of a writer. I’m not a big reader.”
His stories get to the point quickly.
“A friend of mine said that he liked The Last Cow in the Chute because he’s an impatient reader,” Larsen said. “Well, I guess I’m an impatient writer.”
Sometimes recalling and retaining some of the memories that lead to stories is difficult for Larsen.
“My problem is, sometimes I can remember a story, something will jog my memory, but if I don’t write down the title or something to get back to that memory I lose it in an hour,” he said.
“My biggest problem is keeping track of things,” he added. “I don’t really have good access to my records and a lot of those records don’t exist. Particularly before the days of the computer all of those records were on paper, and you accumulate a whole raft of paper that gets cumbersome. So a lot of those records are discarded over the years.”
Still, a lot of the most interesting happenings in Larsen’s veterinary career are recorded for posterity in “The Last Cow in the Chute.”
The book can be purchased online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and autographed copies are available for purchase at Lilies and Lovelies , 1141 Long St., in Sweet Home.