Dr. Frank Gentile of Milwaukee– 1960

Dr. Frank Gentile of Milwaukee – WVMA President 1960

     

Personal information

        I've been living in Milwaukee now since 1946. I graduated in 1942. I was in the service for a little over three years, 29 months of which was spent overseas. My wife and I live here alone now, since my three daughters are gone. One of them is married and has eight children, one is married and has two, and one is not married and has her PhD from Harvard. I'm very happy and grateful to have my family.

        I went to the University of Wisconsin in 1937-38, and then I transferred to Iowa State and went to veterinary school. In August when I got my draft card I came home and went in the Army.

World War II experience

       Here I am in the school a couple of months before and breeding cattle for a month and all of a sudden, I'm going on a ship overseas. And it wasn't until four years later when I came home that I found out what had happened to me. The veterinarian who was the camp veterinarian where I was sent, his wife had a baby the week before and the colonel switched the papers and sent me overseas in place of him. I didn't know this until years later. He ended up in Milwaukee, and I met him. We didn't have a very cordial meeting, but he knew about it. Here I was a young kid out of college just a couple of months, and I'm sent overseas.

       We did have a good experience on the ship, though. There were 26 veterinarians, and the oldest veterinarian was a lieutenant colonel. He called us into his room and he said, “We got an assignment for you.” He said, “We're all being asked to see what's going on in this ship because the GIs are all complaining.       

       I was given a canteen to take to go along with the enlisted guys, and when I looked at it, the core of this loin was just completely rotten. I said to him, “What were you feeding these guys?” And he said, “What's wrong with it?” And he took it and put it in his mouth and ate it. The freezers had konked out, and then the food spoiled and then they refroze it. They still weren't eating deluxe, but at least they were getting food that wasn't spoiled. But that was my first experience as a veterinarian in the Army.

Buying a practice

       After the war I came back to my home in Kenosha and found an AVMA Journal. I stopped at the gas station, and I'm looking through the journal and I saw the name of a Dr. Palmer who had died and had lived in Milwaukee. So, I went to his place and his widow was there. Nobody was running the place. It was just a bam and a two-car garage in the back, with a little room that he did his practice in there. I told the widow I'd give her $50 a month just for trial. So, after three months, she raised my rent to $100, and then to $125. I ended up buying the place from her in about a year.

Practice in 1946

        My clinic had two rooms with a water faucet in the back that didn't work, so I had to bring water in from the house. It had a potbelly stove in the waiting room, which the dogs used. The doctor who had previously owned the building had been a large animal practitioner in Milwaukee and did his work with the dairies and their horses. But he was one of these fellas that just started with small animals because he had extra room behind his house in the garage. It had just two rooms, a waiting room and an exam room. And then, in the back, he had some wooden boxes that he made into crates for keeping dogs in the garage.

       When I first came to Milwaukee, a Dr. Neff was the only one I knew who had an x-ray machine, so I took a dog to him once to take x-rays. This x-ray machine was a tube hanging from the middle of the room with wires from one comer to the other. The dog had swallowed the bathtub plug. The people were more interested in getting the plug back because they hadn't taken a bath since the dog swallowed it.

      To my knowledge there were four freestanding hospitals. There was one in Whitefish Bay that was the precursor of the Lakeside Animal Hospital. Dr. Milke had a building on the south side. There was one on Farewell Avenue on the east side, and Dr. Sullivan had one in West Allis. When I came to Milwaukee there were four small animal practitioners: Dr. Nicholson, Dr. Merrill, Dr. Anderson, and myself all came the same week, and we doubled the population of veterinarians.

      We didn't have anybody to learn from or get any information from except ourselves, so we'd call each other back and forth. Vaccines were unheard of. We had serum, but it was of very little help and temporary. Even if it helped, we would see the animal three or four weeks later with meningitis or paralysis. And then, on top of that, we didn't even have any drugs to give them. Sulfanilamide. And then eventually penicillin came in.

During his presidency

       In my presidency, we redistricted the state and wrote the constitution. The committee members were Elmer Woelffer, Bill O'Rouke, Bob Curtis and me. For a long while the state was running its own little bailiwick in Madison and the rest of the state didn't know what was going on and didn't much care. After the constitution was rewritten, that was the end of it. When that came out, then they had something to look at.

       The second issue we needed to deal with was, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, this depart-ment issued the veterinary licenses.  We wanted to be a separate entity, we did get it passed and the governor picked the state board of examiners.       

        Bill O' Rourke got a lot of heat, some he had coming and some he didn't. He had a heck of a job there. In the first place, he did this on his own voluntarily, and in the second place, what happened to him was that people were complaining that he ran the state. And that isn't true. He wasn't running the state. If he was, it was by default. Just like a computer has default. If nothing else is in there, it'll run its own program. And he was doing everything that nobody else would do. He always asked for help, but he never got it. So, in fairness, I would defend Bill anytime because he really had a rough row to hoe. We had it set up that the WVMA president would be voted on by the membership, but the executive board had a representative from each district and the chairman of the executive board.

        There was some talk about just having a president of the executive board and forgetting the president since it was viewed as a token job. To some degree there was truth to it but, on the other hand, our intention was to have a bicameral thing going by having one representative – the president speaking for the membership at large and the executive board speaking for the various associations of the state. I know at the time there was a big squabble about it. I was against that because I wanted to keep two people running it so as to have some balance, like the Senate and the House. And then there was a long time before any small animal practitioner got elected. In fact, I think I was the next one that got elected.

        Dr. Beach resigned in 1959. His secretary was Hazel and she stayed on to help out. This is the time that we hired Dr. O'Rourke. He used her as an intermediary with all the information from the old office. In fact, at first we used her office on East Washington Street in Madison.  Later, Dr. O'Rourke offered the use of the office in the basement of the Joyce Funeral Home on West Washington, which was Bill’s wife’s family business.

Beginning of the Veterinary Examining Board

        We wanted to get more participation from the veterinarians. We tried to make it a veterinary association at first. The big problem we had was the Department of Agriculture. We got our license from the Department of Agriculture. We wanted to be a separate entity in this state, a veterinary board that was not a branch of the Department of Agriculture. This must have been in the late 50s. We were ready

to recommend that we become a separate entity, then Dr. McDermid said that maybe we should be careful because, under the state Department of Agriculture we had one man to deal with. On our own, we'd have the governor to deal with, so we'd become political, and he started having second thoughts. We ended up going ahead anyway. We got a separate entity, and then the governor picked the state board examiners.

AVMA Convention in Milwaukee

       The AVMA came to Milwaukee in 1951. In fact, Dr. Ken Nicholson was the chairman, local chairman, and I was the secretary. In fact, after that, I was on the House of Delegates for 13 years to the national committee. We all liked it in Milwaukee. It was really something I'll never forget, because I had people from all over the country at the House of Delegates. The thing that bothered me was that when I was a delegate for Wisconsin, I was on my own. I remember the last four years before I finally quit, I kept saying at the state meetings, I'd like to represent the state, but I'm only representing myself, because I don't get any input from anybody. I didn't mind it, I enjoyed it, but I was feeling guilty about it. Most average people don't even know what's going on and don't care. That's the sad part.

Annual meeting

        They use to have the meetings in Madison. You went to Madison and it was a just a drug hospitality room that you went to and you talked to a drug salesman. They'd have a couple drinks and play cards. That's all it was. It wasn't an association. This bothered some of us and we came up from Milwaukee and tried to make an issue of it. One day, we were at the Pitman Moore hospitality room, and there was a poker game. Drs. Milke and Gordie Marold were playing and somebody made some remark about them. Someone jumped over the poker table and took a swing at the guy because he was picking on Dr. Milke. Two of us ended up walking him around the square at the capitol to quiet him down because they were really getting at it. That was kind of a shame because, as a young veterinarian just starting out I wondered what I was getting into here with these drunken brawls. But it straightened out after a while.

        Conventions were not oriented to continuing education programs. The only kind of speakers we had were being sponsored free of charge. There was usually somebody speaking for a drug company, or somebody who came out with a new product. They would try to cover it up so it didn't look like a commercial. But they really were commercials.

        The annual meetings were more of a camaraderie. Three days off from practice was really what it was. There was nothing that educational about it. In fact, I remember a few times making comments, you learn more talking with other veterinarians. We'd go to the meetings sometimes and sit out in the hotel. I remember sitting in the Pfister one day in the lobby there with about a half a dozen guys, and we were talking like we're talking now. It was the best time I ever had. The meetings were, in most cases not very good. They could have put the stuff from the meeting on a piece of paper and give it to us with our program and forget about a speaker.

        In the middle to late 1950s, we started getting educational programs. We started a program committee and did it. Beach did it up until that time, for a couple of years. When we started getting committees that's what made the difference. The committee would collect issues.

Veterinary school issue

        I heard so many complaints from around the state that there was no need for a school in Wisconsin. We had a veterinary school in Michigan, Minnesota, and Illinois. People wondered why we had to build another one I tried to reflect what I was getting from the membership, and I know a couple of times I was on record with the membership that I didn't think we should have a school. I then started getting some heat from people like Glenn Downing and even Bill O'Rourke who said I shouldn't be speaking against it. I got almost to the point where I was convinced that I didn't want to have one, but I was told politely that because the powers that be wanted one, I should keep quiet.

Advertising

        We started advertising in the 1940s in a very small way; it looked like it does today. Some had good-sized ads and it seemed that as soon as you could afford it and then you start making a bigger ad. Our local association worked to eliminate all the ads and just put your names in. It worked. We changed it in the 1950s.

        Shortly after the mid-1960s they started going the other way, gradually. First thing that happened is that we started getting bold print. This is sort of a compliment to the telephone company's ability to talk people into it because we had everybody convinced as members that we'd all just have one line under the association. Little by little, one or two guys broke and they'd put in a big name. Some of the first guys that broke were people who didn't even belong to the association. And then, a couple in the association said, “Well, if they got a big one, why can't we put one in?” And this grew gradually to where we are almost way, way worse than when we started.

        This happened nationwide, too. When I was on the AVMA House of Delegates, we were all for no advertising. We were professionals. I hate to be critical, but we've lost a lot of our professionalism. Just like we get into all this stuff in the journals about how to fix up your waiting room so you can promote products better. My idea of a waiting room was a place for the people to sit with their dogs and be comfortable and wait, not a place to sell them something. What I read in these journals now is scary. They're promoting everything.

Organized veterinary medicine

       I can empathize with the WVMA presidents. I took time off and I didn't have that big a practice. But I felt it was my obligation as a professional to the profession itself. We had meetings galore. The most we ever got I think was $25 on the executive board. My feeling was that it was our profession, and we should defend it

Professionalism compared

       One thing comes to mind immediately in 1946 to 1950, in the early years. If a person came in with his dog and had been to somebody else in town, because there weren't so many of them, I would know where they had been. If I didn't know, I'd find out by calling all the other veterinarians. In other words, I'd look at it as if I wanted to help the client, but I also wanted to be fair to both the other veterinarian and to myself. I felt I'd rather be on the side of the other veterinarian than on the side of a new client. Because lots of time a new client maybe have a legitimate complaint, other times they don't. They just don't like what it cost or some remark he made. So, my first feeling was that I'd find out from the other veterinarian what he wanted. Today I don't think you'd do that. I think that from the first the other veterinarian thinks you're trying to belittle him or take advantage of him. That's not professionalism, I don't think.

Views on emergency practice

       The emergency clinics are going to charge exorbitant fees compared to our fees, and I don't blame them. Even when they got real out of line, I still felt in defense of the emergency clinic. They're staying up all night to take care of this and they're doing it but, on the other hand, it has gotten abused now. I don't know how it is right today.

       I got in a position sometime where somebody would come in and say, “Well, look, I'd rather wait till tomorrow and take my chances than go there if it's going to cost me a thousand bucks.” So, I tell them, “Look, as long as the case doesn't sound serious to you, just so you know there is a place available.” Then they know where you stand. But, I'm still trying to protect the other veterinarian. I don't think that is true anymore. I've had veterinarians here locally talk to me, cussing out the emergency clinic. The emergency clinic is a product of their own doing. Why cuss them out?

Final thoughts

       I'm grateful that I was a veterinarian for 50 years. I've got nothing to be more grateful for. I don't know any profession where I would have had the experiences I've had.

       Recently a veterinarian told me we lived through the Halcyan years (times of happiness, golden, calm and prosperous), not only in veterinary practice, but just in life. I mean we've lived in a period in the last 75 years that I don't think you could every imaging in history before or since. Think of what's happening now with the veterinarians and their computers. My gosh, they can get a diagnosis on computer from any school in the country. Just click a button and do it.

Author’s comments:    In 1971, Dr. Ray Pahle, WVMA President, asked Dr. Frank Gentile to speak at the WVMA 56^th Annual Convention, in January in Milwaukee.   Dr. Pahle requested Dr. Gentile to address at the General Session, what it was like starting a small animal practice in 1945, right after World War II.    In Dr. Gentile’s talk, he described that there were only five small animal practices in Milwaukee in 1945.   One of the practices owned a used X-ray machine.    The other practices shared that same machine, when-ever they needed it.   On the subject of the WVMA Annual Conventions, the first state convention Dr. Gentile attended, he was amazed there were no lectures for the small animal practitioners.  Yet, very few lectures for the large animal practitioners, but lectures on the State level about the new regulations and laws affecting veterinary medicine.  Mostly for three days and nights, the drug companies held their Hospitality Suites in numerous rooms, filled with cigar smoking practitioners, playing cards and taking advantage of the food and drink.  The next year, Dr. Gentile and his small animal committee changed the convention lecture schedule to include six small animal courses.   According to Dr. Gentile, there were only about a dozen strictly small animal practitioners in the state at that time.