For 34 years, Stan Doc Garrison didn’t so much make house calls as he did farm calls.
Ballston native Penny Heritage has captured the life and times of Garrison’s colorful life in her book, `Burnt Hills Veterinary Tales.`
Writing in the first person, the book is a charming narrative that’s a walk down memory lane for anyone living in or familiar with the towns of Burnt Hills and Ballston.
Heritage’s family has long been a part of the town’s agricultural history. She was one of four daughters raised on Palmer’s Acres View Farm, 345 acres in Ballston, and graduated from Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake High School. Heritage earned a degree in agricultural science, and then worked in communications and public relations. She now runs her own business, Heritage Farm Originals, creating and painting agricultural designs for farms and other organizations.
Heritage’s calling to write
`Doc will be 90 years old in March, and he’s such an icon in town that it was important to me his stories not be lost,` said Heritage. `We sat down in his living room, and I started the tape recorder and just let it run.`
Heritage is a distant relative of Garrison’s, and remembers him making visits to her family farm. The book is her first foray into being an author and a publisher.
`The biggest thing I’d ever written was a 12-page newsletter,` said Heritage. `It was a labor of love, but I had a gut feeling it had to be told.`
More than 2,250 copies of the book have been sold to date, many picked up by local people at Fo’ Castle Farms. Heritage will have a book signing at the farm on Saturday, Dec. 8, from noon to 2 p.m.
`We didn’t think it would be likely to sell beyond Burnt Hills, but people have bought it from Florida, Oklahoma, Alaska; a couple from Slovakia bought it,` said Heritage. `Families send it to other family members who grew up here.`
About Doc Garrison
Garrison was born in Burnt Hills at his family’s farm on Goode Street. At the turn of the century, the 30-square mile town of Ballston had a population of 2,000. Milk was the main source of income for the family, who had 35 cows and used a Hinman milking machine powered with a gasoline engine.
In summertime, if they had extra milk, it went to Bischoff’s Chocolate Factory in Ballston Spa, a business that is a happy memory to many local adults because of the extra candy they used to hand out to kids at the end of the day. The Garrisons earned $2 for 100 pounds of milk. In winter months, they harvested ice for their own icehouse, for Markham’s Bakery and Turpit’s store. If the ice was thin and they slipped through, Garrison and his siblings trudged home, changed into dry clothes, and started out again.
One of the highlights of Garrison’s childhood was attending the annual Ballston county fair, held the week before school started. The family’s Model-T had a hard time just getting up the steep incline of Fairgrounds Avenue. After the fair, the family would make a shopping trip to Montgomery Wards in Latham for school clothes. Garrison and his siblings attended a one-room schoolhouse on Scotchbush Road behind their home. In 1916, a school was built on Lakehill Road and named the Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake School of Agriculture and Homemaking, and its first graduating class consisted of two people.
Garrison’s uncle, Bert, was the town of Ballston supervisor in the 1930s, and when the caucus was held at Turpit’s store, one of his campaign promises was to get the roads fixed.
`Uncle Bert came through and the road crew cut the brush, put the stones through a crusher, and raised the road,` writes Heritage in Garrison’s voice. `It was quite an improvement, and that’s how it became Goode Street instead of Goode Road.`
Following his father’s death in 1935, Garrison helped his mom take care of the farm. In 1938, he went up Pashley Road to help plow out a garden, and met Shirley Miller, who would become his wife. He then went to Cornell University and started coursework to become a veterinarian. He graduated in 1950, and his civic support kicked in. He learned from a mentor about Rotary Clubs, and Garrison decided to launch one in Ballston.
`I felt that Rotary was a good organization to get involved in because the local business and professional leaders worked together to help their own communities as well as people around the world,` Garrison said, as told through Heritage.
In 1950, the family remodeled their farmhouse with the help of Shirley’s father, Harris Miller, and opened the first Burnt Hills veterinary hospital, where the business was 70 percent large animal cases and 30 percent small.
In Garrison’s words: `In the fall of 1950, we thought we’d need to make three calls a day at six dollars a call. We figured that on $18 a day, we could make it just fine.`
The rest of the story
Heritage’s book is filled with humorous and heart-wrenching vignettes from Garrison’s work for 34 years as a town veterinarian.
Written in the same conversational voice as James Herriot’s `All Creatures Great and Small,` the book is a reminder that one person can touch the lives of many, both humans and their four-footed friends.
In a letter to Garrison from Pete Farrell, who worked with him at the Burnt Hills Veterinarian Clinic, Farrell brings the history of the animal care facility full circle.
`In 1985, we stopped doing farm calls because our area was changing from a farming community to a suburban one,` said Farrell. `We began to offer more evening hours and Saturday hours to make the hospital available to families with two working parents. We now have seven full-time and three part-time doctors, and a support staff of 60.` “