Top Tobacco Inspired My Veterinary Career

 

Top Tobacco Inspired My Veterinary Career
Dave Wright, DVM

I brushed the tobacco leaves from my feet before I crawled between the sheets in my dorm room on the seventh floor of Stearn’s Hall. It was winter quarter of my freshman year at St. Cloud State—1972.  Tomorrow is Friday, I thought. Woz, my sleepy-eyed, shaggy-headed roommate will leave for his home on “The Range” taking his can of Top tobacco and roll-your-own cigarette papers with him. Most of the other residents will depart as well, leaving the dormitory nearly empty until late Sunday evening. Those of us without a car or a confident hitchhiking thumb will be stranded here…but it will leave me plenty of time to air out the room, sweep the tile floor, and listen to the latest Three Dog Night album.

I closed my eyes and considered my future. I have a passion for biology, owing in large part to an excellent high school teacher. But what will I do with a biology degree four years from now? I don’t want to teach—even though my dad loves his job as a teacher. I’m too impatient for research. I’d consider wildlife management because I could work outdoors, but are there any jobs? Government work? Umm. Not now.

What about veterinary medicine? My dad’s an ag teacher and both my younger brothers want to be farmers. I could join the family’s agricultural tradition. I enjoyed riding with my hometown vet over the Christmas break. Veterinary medicine is fast paced: Driving from farm to farm. Working outdoors. Meeting clients. Diagnosing problems. Treating animals. Seeing results within a week. And I hear it pays well. Perfect.  It’s applied biology—just like human medicine, but I won’t have to spend my life turning pale under a bank of fluorescent lightbulbs. Tomorrow morning, I thought, I’m going to apply to the University of Minnesota where I can oversee my application to the College of Veterinary Medicine. I hear they call it the “farm campus,” so there ought to be plenty of students like me—and I’ll make certain to find a roommate who doesn’t smoke Top tobacco.

After my epiphany, I shared my decision to apply to vet school with some of my college classmates. St. Cloud State was not known for catering to students with an agricultural interest. In the word association game, when my student peers heard that I was planning to go into large animal veterinary medicine, the first word they associated with “veterinarian” was “cow f---er.”

I never used profanity at home. My dad claimed that he had only heard me swear once when I was a kid. My brother had been given a go-cart, and Dad had taken us to the fairgrounds to drive it around without the interference of car traffic. The go-cart had a centrifugal clutch. To get it moving, you simply stepped on the gas pedal. When the engine’s rpm’s increased, it engaged the clutch and off you went. But something had gone wrong with the engine—I think it was a stuck governor—so that when you pulled the starter cord, the engine speed was already revved up to engage the clutch. That worked fine as long as the driver was in the seat and someone else pulled on the starter cord.

It was my turn, and I had driven the go-cart to the far end of the fairgrounds. I put it into a spin, and the engine died. I looked back to see that Dad and the rest of our friends were so far away that it would have taken several minutes for someone to help me start the engine. Being as impatient then as I am now, I decided that I could get out of the seat, pull the starter cord, and jump into the seat before the go-cart took off. I was wrong. I pulled the cord, and the go-cart jumped into gear and was off on its own. I chased it on an erratic path as the steering wheel spun one way and then the other whenever it hit a bump or a mound of gravel. It didn’t stop until it hit a telephone pole. Everyone enjoyed watching the chase scene, particularly when I kicked the errant vehicle and shouted, “Sh--!” in a squeaky, adolescent voice.

Dad was surprised at my outburst and wondered where I had picked up that kind of language. I chose not to remind him of all the time I had spent with him in our basement shop. Whenever he had trimmed a board three times, and it was still too short, or when he had mistaken his thumb for a nail, I had my introductory course in cussing.

After a year of college, surrounded by students eager to share what they had learned in their homes, I thought I had become quite proficient in swearing. It wasn’t until I spent a week working on a crew for Fritz Roofing in Worthington where I discovered that we college kids were mere amateurs in the art of profanity.

After my year at St. Cloud State, I had returned home for the summer and began to look for a job. I applied at Fritz Roofing and was surprised to be hired on the spot. Monday morning, I was on a flat-topped roof spreading hot tar and pea rock. My fellow crew members trained me with explicative language that made my college experience sound like Sunday School. I was miserable. After one day on the job, I went to bed praying for rain. The following morning, I despaired to see the sun shining brightly. About mid-morning of the second day, I was told to unload a two-hundred-pound barrel of pitch from the back of a truck. I rolled it toward the edge of the flatbed and jumped down to the ground. As I slid the barrel close enough for me to slide it off the back of the truck, it suddenly careened into my arms. I tried to catch it but instead managed to smash my thumb between the barrel and the bed of the truck. The foreman took a quick look—and probably was as happy as I was—to tell me I was done for the day. They would take me to the clinic for x-rays during the lunch break.

Nothing was broken, but the doctor said I couldn’t return to work for a week. I used the time to paint a hog house at home and look for other work. On Friday, I told Fritz that I quit, and by the following Monday, I was at work at a local mobile home factory. I liked that summer job, but by September I was eager to return to academic life.

I heard from Fritz Roofing once more when I came home for Christmas break. There was a letter waiting for me. What now? I thought. I tore open the envelope and found a check for fifty dollars—workmen’s comp for five days of lost wages. I thought I’d hit the Las Vegas jackpot.

Shortly after I arrived on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, I found that the perception of veterinary students was entirely different from what it was at St. Cloud. Veterinary students were respected as one notch above medical students—the ones who walked around campus in scrubs with stethoscopes hanging around their necks—and law school wasn’t even considered a career.

The first quarter of my freshman year at St. Cloud, I had taken a calculus class. I didn’t know at the time that advanced math was not required for entrance to vet school. I got the top grade in my class and received a B+. (My professor knew that I had been solving the problems by rote memory and didn’t really understand the difference between an integral and a derivative.) That B was an aggravating blemish on my transcript.

Since I had taken the calculus class, I had neglected to take chemistry in my first quarter at St. Cloud State. When I decided to apply to vet school and visited with my pre-vet advisor, I found out that I needed six quarters of chemistry. (We were on the quarter system at the time—fall, winter, and spring.) I was behind one quarter of chemistry if I wanted to apply after two years of pre-vet.

That meant that in my first quarter at the U, I needed to double up and take inorganic chemistry and organic chemistry the same quarter. Organic chemistry made sense to me. It was tidy. The goal was simply to figure out a way to turn one compound into another using a series of chemical reactions. The more tricks or reactions you knew, the easier it was to figure out the process.

Inorganic chemistry was a different beast. Who would have expected that we would need to memorize each chemical reaction and the color it generated in the lab? No system. No rhyme or reason. Just hard-core memorization. I got a C on my first inorganic chemistry test. I returned to the dorm in a rage. Another blemish on my transcript? I stomped to the top of the stairs on the fourth floor and flung my three-ring notebook down the stairs. We were allowed to throw out one test score, and I had to use up my grace score in the first week of class.

Despite this unsettling performance at the beginning of the school year, my acceptance letter arrived in my P.O. box at Bailey Hall on March 16, 1973, the day before St. Patrick’s Day. I opened the dusty mailbox—one that received a letter a week from my parents and an occasional letter from a high school friend—to see a thick envelope. I had heard from others who had applied that the rejection envelope was a skinny thing. It only took a single page to say you were rejected. It was a form letter that was sent to 387 of the 450 applicants that year. Mine was different. I had been accepted!

I skipped class the next day and went with friends to downtown St. Paul in search of green beer. I dug through my closet and found a green polka dot tie to go with a green flannel shirt. For a change, I didn’t even look out of place. The sun was shining brightly, but a brisk wind blew through the streets along the Mississippi River. It took us four attempts to find a pub that served green beer, but we finally arrived at one with an Irish name—Fitzpatrick’s, O’Briens, McBrady’s, McGarry’s—something like that. By the time everyone had toasted my good fortune, my memory had become blurred.

I was one of the youngest members of my class, at 19. When I sat down in front of my microscope for the first time, I had barely started to date. Several classmates were already on their second marriages. I was so naïve when I applied to veterinary school that I thought it was a one-shot deal. If I applied and didn’t get in, I supposed it meant that I should change my career. Since I didn’t have a second option, I made plans to travel to Europe if I didn’t get accepted. My European travel plans were delayed four years.

Once I arrived for class, I was surprised to learn that several classmates had applied three times before they got accepted. All but six of us had at least a bachelor’s degree, and three of them had already received their PhD’s. When I surveyed the achievements of my classmates, I decided it was time to lower my bar of academic excellence…to academic survival. Prior to my admittance, I had been an academic sprinter, satisfied with nothing less than an A. I decided it was time to become a long-distance runner focused on endurance. All I needed to do was learn what was needed, put in four years with acceptable grades, and walk across Northrup Auditorium with my degree.

Back then, I trained to be an academic, but I was not an athlete. I once had a sadistic, seventh-grade phy-ed teacher who told me I needed to run the 880-yard dash at the annual track and field day. To me that was not a dash. It was a marathon. I didn’t know if I could run that far without stopping. I snuck over to the track one night after dark and pushed myself to run the two laps required for the 880—just to make sure I could do it.

The last time I went out for football, I was a ninth-grade, eighty-pound guard. I chose to become a lineman, not because of my ability to open a hole for a fullback, but because I didn’t think I could memorize the plays if I were a ball-carrier—an obvious case of misplaced insecurities. I pulled on size-small shoulder pads, slipped my feet into oversized cleats, and tripped out of the locker room for practice. When I held the dummy for the real linemen, they slobbered like attack dogs, waiting to see how far they could make me bounce. At the end of the season, I put my efforts into the pep band.

I mustered the courage to go out for wrestling my senior year of high school. I had no illusions about making the team, but I wanted to get in shape, learn more about the sport, and become a better fan for my younger brother who had made it to the State Tournament as a freshman. It must have been agony for a good wrestler like him to watch me scrimmage. I spent most of my time on my back bridging, waiting for the whistle to blow to end the period. I can tell you that there are exactly eight lights in wire cages that grace the ceiling of the gymnasium.

My goal in each of these athletic endeavors was to finish without embarrassing myself. That became my academic goal in vet school too. Leave the class ranking to the gunners.

It’s always surprising how small things can have such a big impact on our lives. Who would have predicted that a few bits of Top tobacco leaves would have led me to a satisfying career in veterinary medicine. I should send Woz a thank you note for being a smoker.

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