Joe Virgin, 83, can no longer drive himself to a monthly breakfast and poker game, but his five buddies, all retired veterinarians, have been getting together for more than 50 years, and it wouldn't be the same without him.
They used to meet at each other's houses and play cards until 2 a.m. when their veterinarian practices in the Puget Sound area flourished and as their families grew. Now they get together at Claire's Pantry in Edmonds for breakfast, adjourn to Bob Burch's apartment a few blocks away and joke that they'll try to stay awake until 2 in the afternoon.
Virgin operated the Mountlake Terrace Animal Hospital until his retirement in 1986. A car accident and a series of small strokes have left him paralyzed in one arm. His eyesight and memory also are closing in.
Roy Toole, 80, who drives to the game from Bellevue, picks up Virgin at his home in Lake Forest Park. When they play cards now, Toole sits close to Virgin and tells him what's in his hand.
"We all adjust to it," said Burch, who ran Ballard-Greenwood Veterinary Hospital for more than 30 years. "We've been friends, buddies for all these years."
When they opened their veterinary clinics in the mid-1950s, they sedated animals by placing ether-soaked bags over the pets' heads and then judged by the increasing paleness of the animals' gums whether they'd given them enough anesthesia.
Sometimes, they had to lasso a cow when they needed to take a blood sample from it.
They built animal clinics and hospitals, incorporating technology and procedures new to animal medicine such as X-ray machines and operating rooms. They introduced antibiotics and vaccines to their patients.
At 84, Burch is the oldest. Walt Keck, 83, was an early partner of Virgin's and ran an animal hospital in Lake City. Toole operated a clinic in Bellevue. Bill Green, 83, built an animal hospital on Mercer Island. Ed Diamond, the youngest at 78, ran an Everett animal clinic.
Missy Bendzak, Green's daughter, visiting last week from British Columbia, noted how the friendships among her father's colleagues have endured.
"For a group of men to have gotten together almost every month for 50 years, and for all of them to still be alive, is pretty amazing," she said.
They all served in the military, either in World War II or the Korean War. Most of their friendships were formed at the Washington State University veterinary school — except for Green, who went to school in Colorado and still gets ribbed about it by the others.
Over the years, their monthly get-togethers became a chance to share common experiences: the problems with cases and running businesses, the raising of children and grandchildren, and the loss of three of the men's wives.
Green tells about the time he grafted new skin onto the head of a prize rooster that had lost its scalp in a barnyard fight. The graft was successful except for one thing: Green had sewn the new skin on backward. The comb was facing the wrong way, and the head feathers were growing forward, toward the rooster's beak.
Burch remembers being asked to extract a loose tooth on a pet chimpanzee. He asked how the tooth got jarred loose and was told that the toilet lid fell on the chimp's head as it was bending over the toilet bowl brushing its teeth.
Keck recalled a man who wanted to board the hated family parakeet during a summer vacation. His instructions to Keck were simple: "Doc, I want it to die."
Keck said he arranged for the bird's cage to be left open in the same room with the clinic cat.
"The transaction was completed," said Keck, as the others wiped tears from their eyes.
Looking back over their careers, the men are struck by the changes in veterinary medicine. Their graduating class at WSU was all men. Now, women make up more than 50 percent of the veterinary graduates nationally.
And, like medicine, the field has gotten increasingly specialized. For example, Green's daughter said she had just taken her dog to an orthopedic specialist to have a torn ligament surgically repaired.
Before this month's get- together, Green worried that they might not all make it. Burch is undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer. Keck was at the emergency room earlier in the week with a racing heart. Toole recently lost his vision in one eye.
But when they settle in to play poker on Burch's well-used, leather-topped, octagonal table, the laughter starts up again. Toole helps Virgin with his cards, but Virgin places his own bets. When Virgin is slow to nudge his chips out onto the table, the others complain that he's going to die before the hand gets played.
By early afternoon when the game breaks up, he's the big winner, raking in $22 from his friends.
Source: Lynn Thompson, The Seattle Times
