June 16, 1938 - February 22, 2010 |
Welcome to Milliron Monday where every Monday we celebrate the legacy of Pete Smith, D.V.M., and Milliron: Abbott “Pete” Smith, D.V.M. The Biography (Monday Creek Publishing 2017). A graduate of Colorado State University and a well-known veterinarian in southeast Ohio, Dr. Smith continues to motivate and inspire.
My
big brother – that’s what Pete was to me, the third sibling among us five. He
was always bigger than life, whether to his little two-year-old sister or to me
now. And the adventures in his life were always just as big. He’d survived so
many near-mythic accidents, I didn’t take this last one as seriously as
everyone near him knew it to be. I missed him – and I miss him.
Pete
and Jody called me up last Fall to thank me for some Maine newspaper horse
stores I’d sent them. We talked for almost an hour, really rare, and in
retrospect so special. That time, I found out he’d totaled his truck just
months before and was pretty badly hurt himself – a first, he assured me. But
he was fine, back to work, no problems.
That
call was especially nice because getting his attention as a child or adult
sibling always seemed hard for me. The only time I really impressed him, I
thought, was when I showed up driving my ¾-ton Dodge diesel truck. The 1910
Stanley Steamer in the trailer didn’t impress him, just the truck pulling it.
Or so I thought!
Living
with Pete was always exciting. When I was about two, I was saving a base for
him at a baseball game in our yard at 48 West Elm in Yarmouth. He came racing
in, landed on my outstretched leg – and broke it! He was great at knife
throwing and he demonstrated it once by making me stand next to a beam on the
second floor of the barn while he threw his knife into the beam from the ground
floor. I got to pull it out of the beam and drop it down to him, I guess – that
part I don’t remember.
In
fact, it had to be at 48 West Elm that Pete decided to be a veterinarian. We
had cows, chickens, pigs, and at least seven horses. Dad, a gentlemen farmer as
they used to call them, commuted 10 miles into Portland to work, so Pete
probably helped Mom out with a lot of farm chores. By the time we moved to our
Little River Farm on Casco Bay in Freeport, there were four of us, so Mom
needed a lot of help.
At
Little River, Pete was probably just a typical big brother. I remember very
clearly his making me put his fishing worms in my pocket. One time he chased me
up an apple tree in the front yard. In the excitement, I jumped from one limb
to another and missed. That time, I had a broken arm. Our first year in Denver,
1952, all by myself I broke my wrist. With three broken bones before I was ten,
I figured out I’d better be more careful, so I stopped breaking bones.
Once
we moved to Denver, Pete was gone to me. He was so much older; we were never in
school together. I remember proudly how he got a summer job at a ranch in the
mythical Laramie, Wyoming – those were the days of great TV and movie
“Westerns.” Visiting and riding around that huge ranch was always exciting.
Then we came back East, and he went to vet school, rode broncs for sport, met
and married the other passion of his life, Jody, had kids, and the rest is the
history we celebrate today.
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