The Clinic in the Garage

Preface: I made the Sweet Home New Era newspaper this week.  Throwback Thursday, 50 years ago. The blog post was written many years ago. It was one of the first of my writings but has never been published.

The Clinic in the Garage

D. E. Larsen, DVM

We had made the decision to move to Sweet in early March of 1976. I contracted for the clinic construction and rented a house by the end of March. The clinic was scheduled to be completed by the middle of August, and we planned to move the first of August. Our son was born in May and an August move would give everyone a good three months to prepare for the move. 

Then things started started to fall apart with those plans. First the the owner of the house we were renting in Enumclaw suddenly needed the house because their son was getting married in a shotgun wedding. The the house I had rented became unavailable. It appeared the realtor who rented the house to me didn’t have authorization to rent it. I pleaded with the owner to no avail.

So we ended up driving into Sweet Home with a truck load of household stuff, four kids, one of which was a month old baby, and no place to go. We considered our selves lucky to be able to rent the last two bedroom apartment in town.

Sandy stayed in Sweet Home, managed the apartment and the kids, and started house hunting. I returned to Enumclaw to complete the final month of my contract. Looking back, we didn’t consider it fun times.

I moved to Sweet Home the first of July, and I did a house call practice. The clinic completion date started getting pushed back. First to the end of September, then to sometime in November. And finally to the first week of December. Surviving on borrowed money, we needed to start generating some income.

Finally, we were able to purchase a house just out of town on Ames Creek. We formulated a plan to set up a clinic in garage.

The house was a nice house that sat close to the road on Ames Creek.  We had a large garden in the back of the house and also near the road.  Large rhododendron bushes lined the front of the house. There was a large oak tree that stood over the driveway.  All the green framed the light blue ranch style house and gave a very homey appearance.

The double car garage was mostly unfinished but was reasonably clean and would have to serve our purposes until the clinic was completed.  Now scheduled for the end of November.  We placed the bank of five cages against the back wall and the exam table in the center of the garage.  The  door opened into kitchen.  A long narrow layout with the sink and cabinets along the outside wall on your left and a long counter on the right. The back of the fireplace provided a brick wall at the end of the room on the right.  We placed the surgery table against this brick wall.  A small desk in the dining room served as an office.  We planned to be rather slack for the fall and felt that this arrangement would be reasonably functional.  

Our first office visit in the garage was on Tuesday after Labor Day, September 7, 1976. Elaine Gravesgaard brought her parents dog Shandharr out to have a lacerated foot pad sutured. Then later that morning Mrs. Jean Meeks brought out Tony, a small cocker spaniel, with a draining sore between his toes. We started slow but the pace increased steadily as we progressed through September. There were several cases that we referred to other clinics in the area because we were not prepared to handle them.

When the new telephone books came out in October our pace quickened.  We had 7 transactions in July, 59 in August, 96 in September, 157 in October, and 186 in November. Compare those figures to the almost 700 invoices a month in 1996 and it doesn’t seem very busy.  When you consider the conditions we were working under, it is amazing.

We had hired Paula to help me in the exam room and surgery. Paula had no experience but a lot of enthusiasm. i set up a thorough training program and we had ample time to go through it. Paula was probably the best trained of my in house trained assistants. 

By the middle of October we were busy enough that we hired Judy to work as a receptionist. Judy was also inexperienced and benefited enormously by the slow steady increase in workload that fall.  Everybody’s training was well in place by the time we moved into the clinic on the 6th of December and we were able to hit the ground running.  Everything that had seemed to be a problem in the summer, the early move from Enumclaw, the rental house problems, and the clinic delays, turned out to be to our ultimate benefit.  By the end of 1976 we were well established as an integral part of the Sweet Home community.

Photo Credit: The New Era, Sweet Home’s weekly newspaper, July 30, 2026. Throwback Thursday, 50 years ago.