Benji

This is Benji's story. Benji was arguably the most unusual patient ever to come to Birchwood - more unusual than the giant Burmese pythons and more unusual than the deadly poisonous fish. This kind of ranking is very subjective of course, but in my opinion, Benji comes out on top. Benji was an African lion. He was a cub mind you, but an African lion nonetheless.

Benji came to Birchwood well before my time, so it is not technically "my story", but it's the clinic's story and it's my clinic, so I'm going to claim it as part of my series of posts about the history of Birchwood Animal Hospital. 

Dr. Al Clark doesn't remember exactly when this happened, but the mid 1960s is likely. One morning he got a call from the Hudson's Bay Company downtown. It seems that Sunbeam, the makers of small kitchen appliances, thought that having a live lion cub in their display would make for a nifty promotion. It was the mid '60s, so people did stuff like that. And they used words like "nifty". This three-month-old cub was in a small cage beside the stand mixers and blenders. His name was Benji and he was extremely cute. Whether this helped sales or not is unknown, but it certainly attracted attention. The Bay was on the phone because Benji had become ill. Could Dr. Clark help them out? It was basically just a big house cat wasn't it? Same diseases and disorders?

Al immediately did two things. The first thing was that he told them to bring Benji right down. The second thing was that he found the phone number for the top Sunbeam executive in Toronto and gave him heck for subjecting a lion cub to that kind of stress and absurdly inadequate housing. Once Benji arrived at the hospital Al declared that he would have to stay and would not be sent back to sell toasters and electric can openers. Benji was basically depressed and poorly cared for and had picked up a secondary opportunistic infection. Chastened, there was no argument from Sunbeam or the Bay. 

The nurses then set about pampering Benji back to robust health. Initially, they went down to the Dairy Queen at Ronald and Portage every day and brought back hamburgers for him. Then it occurred to someone to phone the zoo and ask for advice. With his diet improved and with all the medicine and care, Benji was soon on his way to a full recovery. Once he was well enough to leave the hospital, Al would take him home sometimes and the neighbourhood kids would play with him in the yard. Can you imagine?  Your neighbour is a vet and brings home a lion cub and lets you play with it? Different times... 

After a couple of months Benji had grown from cocker spaniel size to small Labrador size and was becoming "a little nippy". Clearly, a long-term plan was needed. This had been on Al's mind for a while and he had made inquiries. The best solution seemed to be the Okanagan Game Farm, a sprawling exotic wild animal park near Penticton, where there were other lions and there was lots of space for Benji. It was tearful day for everyone when he was loaded into the back of a staff member's car and they headed west down Portage Avenue.

Several years later another staff member was on vacation in the Okanagan and decided on a whim to try and visit Benji. She walked up to the fence and peered out across the fields and clumps of trees. There were no animals in view. In the heat of the day the lions were probably in the shade somewhere. So she called out, "Benji! Benji!" and wouldn't you know it, but a beautiful fully grown male lion came bounding up out of the distance and put his paws up on the fence. It was Benji. 

The Birchwood Story (Part 1)

I apologize that this subject is not a perfect fit for this blog. The number of people interested in the history of a specific veterinary clinic in Winnipeg is probably quite low, lower even than the number of people interested in reading why urine is yellow or how you give a pill to an ostrich. However, it is certainly a better fit for this blog than it is for my whisky or travel blogs, so here it goes!

His friends call him Al and his former clients know him as Dr. Clark, but when in 1939 at the age of 12, he decided that he was definitely going to become a veterinarian, he was Elmer. Elmer grew up on his parent's dairy farm near Hartney, in the far southwest corner of Manitoba. He was surrounded by animals from the very beginning. The farm not only had a herd of milking Holsteins, but his dad, who had flown Sopwith-Camel biplanes in World War One, also had a large team of award-winning Clydesdale draft horses. The family's border collie, Major, also made a big impression on the future veterinarian. Elmer loved to follow his dad out to help milk the cows at 4:30 in the morning. At the time they had 41 cows, of which 29 were milkers. Major would zip off into the pre-dawn dark and return a short time later with exactly those 29 milkers, not one more, not one less, leaving the other 12 on the pasture.

The local country vet, Dr Houck, let Elmer ride with him on his calls, sometimes in his truck and sometimes even in his horse-drawn buggy. If you've read or watched James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small, you'll have a good mental image of what these farm calls were like because this is the same era and the same type of practice. These experiences confirmed Elmer's choice of future career, so in 1946 he applied to the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) in Guelph, which at the time was Canada's only veterinary college. He didn't get in then, so he began to study Agriculture at the University of Manitoba instead. Dr Houck, who had in the meantime become the provincial veterinarian for the Province of Manitoba, was convinced of his potential, so he arranged a special bursary whereby Elmer would have a spot assured at OVC, paid for by the government, in exchange for a commitment to spend a minimum of five years in practice in rural Manitoba. There was a great shortage of large animal vets then, much as there is now, 70+ years later! He started at OVC in 1947. Because of his year in Agriculture he was able to graduate with his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine just four years later, in 1951.

Now officially "Dr. Clark", he set up practice in Morden, Manitoba, where there hadn't been a vet for a number of years. His nearest colleague was Dr. Ken Warren in Killarney, 85 miles to the west. For a big chunk of south-central Manitoba, the newly graduated Dr. Clark was "it", 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for every living creature from litters of barn kittens all the way up to expensive prize bulls. He loved the challenge and the variety and the people, but he knew that the pace was going to burn him out, or even kill him. Moreover, he was newly married and his wife, a city girl from Guelph, was increasingly showing the strain of living in a small town with a perpetually absent husband. So in 1958, Dr. Clark bought a piece of undeveloped land on what was then the western edge of Winnipeg and he made a trip to Ontario to visit his old OVC classmates, Drs. Blake Graham and Dick Ketchall, who had recently opened Amherst Veterinary Hospital in Scarborough. 

Dr. Clark came back from Scarborough with a set of blueprints rolled up under his arm - Blake and Dick had given him the plans for Amherst for free. His next stop was to visit Dr. Bill Jones at Pembina Veterinary Hospital, the closest of the two existing small animal practices in the city (the other was Anderson Animal Hospital In St. Boniface, owned by Dr. Norm Anderson). He went, in his words, "cap in hand" to let Dr. Jones know of his plans to open a new veterinary clinic. That's a level of professional courtesy that has sadly faded into history! Birchwood was then built, more or less as a clone of Amherst, through the cold hard winter of 1958/59 by Malcolm Construction, with Jack Ross as the local architect. In the meantime, Dr. Clark acquired a partner.

Dr. Frank Gulyas was a refugee from the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He was in practice in Carmen during the last two years Dr. Clark was in Morden. They would sometimes meet halfway to chat. As the development of Birchwood was ramping up, Dr. Gulyas approached Dr. Clark with a proposal. His wife, having come from high society in Budapest, was having an even harder time than Marjorie Clark with prairie small-town life. Could they be partners at Birchwood? Splitting the costs and the risk seemed like a good move, so Dr. Clark readily agreed. Gulyas changed his name to Grant (this was an era when "foreign" names could cause problems) and on July 11, 1959, Dr. Clark and Dr. Grant opened the doors of Birchwood Animal Hospital for the first time. They saw 7 patients that day, which they thought was a pretty good start.

Providing a living for two families from a newly opened small animal clinic was not realistic though, so Dr. Grant continued to do some shifts in Carmen. An opportunity to earn some extra income soon fell in Dr. Clark's lap too. Dr. Anderson had also been doing post-race testing for the horses at the race track, but his son was a jockey, so the commission decided that this was a conflict of interest and approached Dr. Clark to take it over. He had loved horses ever since being around his dad's Clydesdales, so this was perfect. From this, he also developed a small hobby horse practice on the side at Westgate, with, among others, the wealthy Richardsons as clients.

But then in 1960, the massive Westwood suburban development was announced. Within a couple years Birchwood was booming as new families and their pets flooded into the area.

Dr. Frank Grant left for Vancouver in 1965 as Winnipeg was not big enough for his wife either.
Dr. Al Clark continued to work full-time at Birchwood until 1995. As of this writing, at the age of 91 (92 next week!), he is still full of energy and full of stories and full of passion for veterinary medicine.