“I did it for the animals,” says Burgess Bauder of his fifty-one year veterinary practice. “I didn’t do it for the people.” While Burgess didn’t charge for his services, clients usually reimbursed him (at wholesale rates) for costly medications or anesthetics. This is not to say he didn’t try to be a regular paid veterinarian at the beginning. “(I’d) charge somebody an office call back in the day when I first came to town (in 1973) five bucks, and I’d send them a bill three or four times for five bucks,” says Burgess. “And then finally I said, ‘I spent that much on stamps for god’s sake.'” (Victoria Vosburg photo)
I’ve been taking my dogs to Burgess for 35 years. He knows I’m not a cat man, and he’s relishing this tête-à-tête we are having in his pet-filled living room.
“For those out there in the radio audience, Rob is tactfully trying to push away a cat that’s trying to rub up against his face,” said Burgess, “and and now she’s going for the throat.”
Burgess – and I should mention that Bauder is universally known simply as “Burgess” like Cher or Zendaya – Burgess is sitting in a recliner with one of his rescued greyhounds curled in a dog bed nearby.
The greyhound doesn’t even lift his head when I come in. He must sense that Burgess is winding up to reminisce about his five-decade old decision to undergo years of advanced medical training in veterinary school at the University of Washington, and then give it away for free. It began in childhood.
“I had a cat, Susie Bell, and I wanted to get her spayed.” Burgess reminisces. “And I can remember the conversation with my dad when, you know, she kept having kittens. I had her from the time I was like five years old until I was in college. I had her almost 20 years and she kept having kittens the whole damn time. And I said, ‘Dad, can we get her spayed? He said, ‘Burgess, we can’t afford it.’ It was 20 bucks back in the 1950s! By the time you pay the rent, pay the this, pay the that, buy the food. My mom was a nurse; my dad was a truck driver. And I remember this:I said, ‘When I’m a vet, I’m going to make it so people can afford it.’”
This is not Burgess’s biography. That’s already been written. It’s called Animal Nature, by John Straley, one of Alaska’s most prolific novelists. I’ll point you there for details about Burgess’s early life, his career in collegiate football, and his life in veterinary medicine. Nor is this his obituary. We nearly had to write that in the mid-90s when Burgess lost a weight belt when diving for geoducks, became inverted, and more or less drowned in his diving helmet. His partner, Larry Trani, found him unconscious on the surface, resuscitated him, and a Coast Guard helicopter medevacked him to Juneau to recover in a hyperbaric chamber, which repressurizes divers who’ve come to the surface too quickly. Burgess claims to hold the local medevac record – six times – which I see no need to dispute.
But, I digress. Burgess now is a hale and hearty eighty-year-old, suffering from a slew of cardiac-related complaints common in this demographic. What he misses most are his regular dog walks. As far as regrets, there are none, except those that haunt every medical professional in a life-and-death situation. Difficult surgeries, without the support of a vet tech or anesthetist, are at the top of the list.
“What is anesthesia but months of boredom interspersed with moments of stark terror,” said Burgess. “And if you look at the statistics for veterinary medicine, it’s close to human medicine… They don’t die from surgeries ever. This is the downside. You asked for all of the warm fuzzies, but the downside is having an outcome that’s something less than optimal. And the worst of that metric is death on the table.”
I’ve produced two previous news stories about Burgess, the first was twenty-two years ago when he was treed by a brown bear on Sitka’s newly-built Cross Trail. The bear, it turned out, had killed his old yellow lab, Cygnet, and cached the carcass near the trail. The second was some years later, when Burgess castrated a pair of nearly-grown brown bear cubs at Sitka’s Fortress of the Bear visitor attraction. Whether this revenge was sweet, or merely served cold, Burgess did not say.
Burgess is a living repository of stories of Sitka and its people. When prompted for just one story, he didn’t hesitate.
“So it’s Christmas Eve,” he begins. “And the phone rings about, yeah, 10:30 at night. ‘And hi, this is Mrs. Such and Such, calling… my doggy’s trying to have babies and can’t.’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘Is there anything coming out?’ ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Go to the clinic and bring along some troops.’ So she arrives at the clinic, and she’s got two daughters herself and her dog. And I look at this thing, and it looks like the Hindenburg! I couldn’t believe it. I cut to the chase, I dispensed and I said, ‘We’re going to do a c-section here.’ And so this poor doggy could barely move. I’m hoping it’s not going to die. And we roll it up on the table and I delivered 13 c-section puppies – the biggest c-section I’ve ever done in my life. Every one (of them) lived. And I’m handing these things out as I’m pulling them out of this bitch. (Can I use the word bitch on the radio? Good!) And I’m handing these out and… we got all these screaming puppies. That is the sound of angels… So this woman has one of these little clasper wallets, you know, with a little thing where you click it like that, keep dollar bills stuffed in there and coinage. And she says, ‘I want to pay you for what you have done.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Keep it. It’s Christmas Eve.’ Oh god, I love that story!”
I can picture the grateful woman opening the coin purse. It evokes an era when coins were more dear than they seem now. The woman found good homes for all thirteen puppies, and Burgess remembers not long ago putting one of the now-elderly dogs down. A service he provided – like everything else – at no charge.
