Bio
Settled now in the wintery woods of New Hampshire, I look back on the perambulations of my life and marvel at the unplanned sidesteps and meanderings. I grew up near the shores of Lake Ontario, in Rochester New York. I liked science but wasn’t one of those annoying little girls who ‘loves animals’ and ‘always wanted to be a vet’. Cats roamed around our house. The closest I got to a horse was watching Dale Evans ride Buttermilk on TV.
Graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1970, with plenty of math and physics courses completed, I dove into the hippy world of drop out, tune in, turn on culture. On a commune in California, I learned how to milk goats, shear sheep, trim horse’s hooves, and get along living with a bunch of lunatics in teepees and yurts. Sick of having no money, I thought becoming a veterinarian could give me a solid living, I could be in a barn instead of an office and have the side benefit of a good dose of science which I had always loved. No one told me getting into vet school was hard.
How I managed to get accepted to University of Pennsylvania in 1974 is a long story, which could be another memoir. I trained to be a large animal veterinarian during a time when vanishingly few women were admitted to veterinary school and most large animal vets were men. After graduation, I spent years trying to break into that world. I took care of dairy and beef cattle, sheep, and a few horses. My practice was in Utah and Idaho, where I earned the nickname Lady Cow Vet.
My memoir, Breaking the Barnyard Barrier: A Woman Veterinarian Paves the Way, tells the tale of my years taking care of cows on Mormon dairies. My marriage to a hippy musician is part of the story. Finally, standing up to my ankles in cow manure, freezing in a Utah winter delivering a calf at midnight, it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t the career for me after all. I left Utah, changed directions many times, had a son with a second husband, worked in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, started a few companies, got another divorce, and survived it all with a modicum of optimism intact.
More information.
