When it’s cold outside I’ve got the month of May.”---Smokey Robinson
The Further Adventures Of Siobhan P. Ellison, DVM, PhD, Champion Of Justice
In the early 1970s, the Subterranean Circus was thriving in the midst of a psychedelic revolution which was altering the culture of a nation. Hippies and the mildly curious prowled its blacklit caverns, products heretofore unseen graced its shelves and a new gestalt was loose in the land.
Meanwhile, several blocks away at the University of Florida, 1971 freshman Siobhan Ellison, a serious young girl who Janis Joplin might call “one of the straight people,” was gathering her books, consulting her advisor and moving into Broward Hall on the UF campus. Since age seven, Ms. Ellison had pined to someday become a veterinarian and this was Stage One. In her subsequent twelve years in Gainesville, she would never visit the Subterranean Circus, nor even think about it. She was there for serious business and had no time for tomfoolery.
Siobhan earned her BS degree in 1974 and then a Masters in ‘76 and was eventually accepted into Florida’s fourth vet school class in 1979, one of a small number of females in what was then a very male-dominated field. Her goal was to become a mobile equine vet and practice in nearby Marion County, a hotbed of the thoroughbred breeding and training industry. All students in veterinary school at UF are obligated to write and apply for a grant during their junior year and Siobhan wrote hers in conjunction with UF Professor Llewellyn Peyton, submitting it to the American Quarter Horse Association. The grant was approved and the AQHA sent a quartet of officials to Gainesville to visit their two new allies.
The president of the Quarter Horse group at the time was a crusty old-school Texan named Charles Graham, who operated a no-frills breeding operation in Elgin called the Southwest Stallion Station. Ellison and Peyton were sent by the university to meet Graham and his crew at the Gainesville airport, and they were initially thrilled. When Graham opened the plane door and saw his welcoming committee, however, the mood quickly changed. “Je-ZUZ!” he sputtered. “They send me a goddam nigger and a woman!” The grantees looked at at one another with concern. Oh-oh, does this mean we don’t get our grant? Siobhan looked over at Payton on the leaden walk to the car and smiled. “At least you got an adjective.”
During his visit, Dr. Charley was nothing if not contemptuous of the Florida way of doing things. In an offhand remark, he foolishly told the future Dr. Ellison, “Come to Elgin some time and we’ll show you the Texas way of doing veterinary medicine.” Siobhan perceived this to be sort of a left-handed invite and when the term was over she got into her little car and drove out to Elgin for a no-pay, long-hours job. “I figured I’d learn a lot in a short amount of time. How bad could it be?” Well…
When she arrived, Siobhan was directed to an empty, unfurnished trailer, her new home. No bed, no appliances, no nuthin’. When she alerted Graham to this obvious mistake, he told her “Don’t worry---you won’t be here long enough to need a bed.” But Charley, poor fool, never realized who he was dealing with. Graham considered himself a tough guy and made it a point to be the first one at work every morning, but now when he got there Siobhan was always waiting to meet him. It irked him no end. She also did the work of two people and was the last one to leave each night, despite getting no salary. As the weeks passed, the grouchy old Texan developed an appreciation for this gritty woman’s tolerance for adversity and her ability to work through it. He sent UF a message; “This little girl outworks everybody out here. If you have any more like her, send ‘em this way.”
Eventually, Siobhan learned everything she needed to know about Texas veterinary medicine. On her departure, she told Graham, “Look me up next time you’re in Florida and I’ll return the hospitality.” She then drove to a hotel, put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and fell onto the bed, out like a light. After some time, there was a knock on the door. A little irritated, she got up and answered the rapping. “Didn’t you see my sign?” she asked the intruder. “Yes, senora,” the nice lady said, “but you’ve been here for three days.”
By the time Siobhan received her Masters degree at age 24, she had obtained a part-time job at a UF lab and salted away a little money. She decided to use some of it to fly to Tennessee for a visit with her brother, Stuart. This was the initial plane trip of her life and it was love at first flight. “I’m going to learn to fly!” she told Stuart when he met her at the airport. He knew her well enough not to doubt it. After the brief vacation, she returned to Gainesville, took flying lessons, bought herself a zippy little Piper Vagabond with the remainder of her savings and hit the skies of central Florida. How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree? Or an exquisite perfectly circular rainbow? “It’s the way the air feels when you’re in the sky,” Siobhan relates. “It’s always a bit different. I felt like a little bird."
All went well for the excited new aviatrix for the first two years. Oh sure, there were a couple of dicey landings, a scary storm or two, nothing your average rookie pilot wouldn’t expect. But then, during a training trip to South Carolina, the poor Vagabond stalled on takeoff and promptly crashed into an inland waterway, smashing the pilot’s face and sending her to the budget version of Hospitals ‘R’ Us. “I was bleeding profusely from the mouth,” Siobhan remembers, '”but neither of my two nurses knew enough to tie off the vessel. They just kept dumping the blood out of the bowl and I was too addled to help.”
By the time a plastic surgeon arrived to inspect the damage, Siobhan’s hematocrit was down to a scary 13. The doctor asked her if she had insurance and she assured him she did. “Then we’re getting you out of this place. They’ll kill you here.” With that, he summoned a departing florist delivery van, tossed his patient inside and drove to the hospital across the street. Battered and bruised within an inch of one’s life, the average flier might have some misgivings about the scary life of the backyard pilot, perhaps some hesitancy to quickly return to the not so friendly skies. Siobhan, of course, was already plotting how to get another plane.
She Fought The Law And The Law Won. Temporarily.
In the thoroughbred horse business, there is no end to the curious maladies a veterinarian might witness. Faced with an animal suffering from a life-threatening canker on the sole of his foot, Siobhan called in her old pal, Dr. Llewellyn Peyton, now an expert in these matters. The good doctor came rolling into town in his brand-spanking-new pickup truck, the kind that sometimes sets a sheriff’s deputy to wondering. Black guy+new pickup=the possibility of shenanigans. The crafty lawmen pulled Peyton over near the intersection of Marion County routes 329 and 318, often called “the sticks.”
Siobhan, traveling right behind Peyton had seen this sort of business before. Outraged, she leapt from her truck to provide support. Dr. Peyton showed the cops all manner and make of identification and truck ownership, but this was Marion County, remember, where Mensa membership is not required for the hiring of deputies. The policemen were not about to be distracted by suspect legal papers when they knew down deep in their wee little souls that something was amiss. Peyton wisely remained fairly quiet while Siobhan jumped around threatening mayhem.
Sooner or later, the requisite drug-sniffing dog arrived. Peyton had plenty of drugs aboard, of course, but none of the sniffable variety. Siobhan was delivering so much invective, the deputies told her to leave or be arrested. Instead, she went to her truck and called the sheriff, himself, an amiable fellow named Ken Ergle, and recited her dilemma. It probably didn’t hurt that the owner of the affected horse was Hans Tanzler, son of the recent mayor of Jacksonville. In any case, Dr. Ellison told her new pal Ken that barring a friendly solution, her next call would be to the Ocala Star-Banner newspaper. Sheriff Ergle, always the gentleman, radioed his shocked minions, ordered Dr. Peyton be dismissed forthwith and called Siobhan back to let her know. “Anything else I can do for you, Miss Ellison?” he wanted to know. Yes, in fact there was. “I would like a meeting,” she said. Ken set it up.
At the powwow, Siobhan insisted the deputies personally apologize to Peyton and the department work a little harder on its profiling problem. The Sheriff promised it would be done (and it soon was). Then, he gave Dr. Ellison his card. “Call me anytime,” he said, smiling. Siobhan was very happy with this surprising turn of events and tucked the card away for future reference. Alas, just when you think you have a friend at the sheriff’s office, the world caves in on you. Not even one year later, Ergle was cited for pocketing over $170,000 in office funds to buy his needy wife all manner and make of snazzy automobiles, fur coats and assorted geegaws. He was summarily dismissed and put in his own jail in a masterpiece of irony. “Wouldn’t you just know it?” lamented Siobhan. “I finally get my own personal Sheriff and now he’s finished, kaput, dead as a mackerel. It’s enough to give a girl the vapors.”
Successors of the ex-Sheriff would be well-advised to mend their ways, mind their manners and stay away from easy-to-rile female veterinarians in the future. Sure, generally they might float like a butterfly but every so often one stings like a bee.
The Impossible Dream
Captain Noonan was a man of means, an aviator and a breeder of sleek thoroughbred horses. He lived in a fine house overlooking a lovely lake on endless acres of property with a charming wife and two unarrested children. The Captain took care of himself, jogging over his property daily with a closely observed stopwatch hanging around his neck, lifting weights, undergoing regular physicals. Didn’t matter. During one of those exams, his doctor told him, “Sorry, Bub, you have ALS.” Those initials stand for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, the endless bummer, the long goodbye, the gift that keeps on taking. Disarmed and at sea, the Captain raced up to his roof and turned on the Siobhan Signal, relieved that help was on the way.
Now, before the local sky was falling, Dr. Ellison knew as much about ALS as you or I. When we were kids, Lou Gehrig taught us it crept in under cover of darkness, was severely debilitating and always fatal. The average Joe with ALS lasted about three years but many went much faster. A few outliers like Stephen Hawking suffered for decades but the result was always the same, a visit to that big landing field in the sky. So what are we going to do now, Marty?
Siobhan Ellison, it turns out, is a natural-born detective. She savors answers, wants to know how things work, eagerly inhales the clues in whodunnits and identifies the murderer before anyone else can get to Chapter 6. But ALS is a wily opponent, bobbing and weaving, juking and jiving, tearing around like a Tasmanian devil, then playing possum. Hard to get a handle on the beast, and just when you think you’re getting somewhere, he slips the leash.
Ellison surveyed the playing field. The hot spot for ALS activity seemed to be the Boston-Cambridge area, where (a) Massachusetts General Hospital had just started humming with a $47 million gift from a stricken captain of industry, and (b) an important bio-tech group called the ALS Association was striving to improve the quality of life for the victims and families of disease sufferers. Still in good shape, the Captain visited both but came away with little hope beyond the vague suggestion of stem cell treatment in Israel or South Korea, little more than a wing and a prayer.
Siobhan began taking more and more time from her own business in an attempt to locate researchers who were working on cures for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, but they were few and far between. A few modest steps forward at the University of Florida led her to a prominent doctor in Miami, a driven, hard-working man overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the fight. She found a clever researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, another at Indiana, one more at Northwestern and a fourth in faraway Brazil and eventually formed a group of 14 which convened for regularly scheduled Zoom meetings.
The Captain, fortunately, was not short on cash. He funded studies here, there and everywhere in search of drugs which might help, and a few possibilities arose. The notion was to slow the disease enough for someone to eventually plunk his Magic Twanger, ring the gong, bring down the confetti. A half-dozen possibilities have arisen from the hunt but it’s still too early to assess their value. Weakened, but still intact, the Captain trudges on with good days and bad days and some in between.
With the life of a good friend in her hands, Siobhan Ellison has no time for foolishness. The Captain’s fate weighs on her daily. She mans the phones, reads the literature, cracks the whip on her team of researchers. She knows the answer is out there somewhere, lurking, hiding behind trees, slipping down dark alleys in the night, sneering, staying one step ahead of its pursuers. The end may come sooner or later but until it does she fights to the death. She is One of the Ones.
Get Me To The Church On Time
Siobhan Ellison is a perfectionist, which can be really annoying because you are not. One day she was fussing over some insignificant error and I assured her “Nobody’s perfect.” Maybe not, she replied, “but I can try to be. Where do you draw the line if you start accepting anything less?”
I got the idea I might be in trouble in this relationship because I had been less than perfect for decades. Might be time to pick up my game. It was like my baseball coach in high school telling me, “Killeen, you’re a left-handed pitcher, you should be able to pick someone off first every now and then.” Pick someone off first? Hell, I was having trouble just getting the ball over the inside corner. But after being advised of my inadequacy, I picked a guy off in the next game. Everybody needs a push now and then. If you were hanging out with Siobhan in any capacity, rest assured you’d be getting plenty of pushes. Amazingly, pretty soon you start pushing yourself.
Dr. Ellison did not expect miracles from people, especially some of the less than brilliant customers who required her services. When she advised them of what would be required to save or rehabilitate an animal, they sometimes questioned their abilities to perform the given tasks. “Just do the best you can,” she told a horseman more than once. It might have been her motto. Do the best you can and don’t pretend your second-best is good enough.
On Valentine’s Day of 2015 at our traditional dinner in Cedar Key, I asked Siobhan to marry me, citing her excellent performance during her 30-year tryout period. She said sure and I began to plan this large and complicated affair with a 16-month grace period. Obviously, everything had to be perfect, from the choice of chapels to the dinner following and the photo session at nearby Valley of Fire. This was fun for me and I also had the benefit of an advisor from the Little Chapel of the Flowers in Las Vegas, so not much would fall through the cracks. Still, her wedding day---even if it’s her second---is a very big deal for a woman and you don’t want to forget the cake, break your nose on the way to the party or get you to the church not on time.
About that last one. I decided to send Siobhan and her self-titled “Best Girl,” Ashleigh Ellison to the chapel in a limo and follow in our rental car so that we could leave the wedding and drive directly to the Valley of Fire afterwards. The problem being that it was an extraordinarily busy time and the Palazzo valet crew took 20 minutes to bring the car up despite my avid flogging. By the time I hit Las Vegas Boulevard, I was flustered by the delay and headed in the wrong direction for two blocks before realizing my error. There was now no way to make it to the ceremony by the appointed time, the single most boneheaded mistake a prospective groom can make.
I called Siobhan and recited the litany of problems. I didn’t expect rage, just disappointment, but I got neither. It is at times like this you realize what a classy broad you have turned up. “I know you’ve been planning forever to make this perfect,” she said, “and it has been so far. Just do your best. If you get here too late we can go to one of those drive-thru marriage places.” How do you get lucky enough to find a woman like this?
Anyone who has been there knows that Las Vegas Boulevard is the slowest street to drive in America. The red lights stay on for hours, the traffic is invariably awful and pedestrians are subject to cross the street at any point. Nonetheless, I believe I set the land speed record from my turnaround spot to the chapel and I doubt anyone will ever beat my time. There were moments of 80 mph driving and an occasional red light might have been ignored, thus putting me there only two minutes late. I had three more to spare. The Little Chapel of the Flowers had three different marriage areas and on Saturdays performed a wedding every half hour in each, so malingerers were abruptly cancelled after five late minutes.
Siobhan, beautiful in her classic white wedding dress, was unruffled, completely at peace with whatever transpired. She took my arm and we marched in to meet the minister as Elvis sang, “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You.” There was a time when I never would have made it, would have realized the hopelessness of it all and let the chips fall where they may. But that wouldn’t have been doing my best, would it? Sometimes it takes a combination of confidence, daring and desperation to bring out the best in you. Sometimes you can do far more than you think you can if you’re just willing to give it a colossal try. Siobhan Ellison taught me that. Pass it on.
Payback
In 1999, Dr. Siobhan Ellison went back to the University of Florida to earn her PhD, working in the laboratory of Dr. John Dame. Candidates are expected to seek funding for their work from outside sources, so Siobhan immediately thought of her old buddy, Charley Graham of the American Quarter Horse Association. Dr. Dame told her not to bother because “the Quarter Horse people have never given us a nickel,” but in Siobhan’s mind Dr. Graham owed her a debt and she had no problem asking for $40,000 AQHA dollars. Charley was no longer president of the group, but still an important cog. Siobhan wondered if Graham would even know who she was, but called and explained her project in detail as her old tormentor took heed.
“Oh yes, I remember you,” he said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about or why you need the money, but yes, I’ll get it for you. I know that whatever you’re doing, it’ll work.” A few days later the check arrived. Turns out crusty old Texans have their own code of honor, too. Despite long odds, seems those days of endless toil in Elgin paid pretty good after all.
Jeeves, The Candles, Please….
Siobhan’s 69th birthday is in four days, on December 13. Each year, her brother Stuart and sister-in-law Mary call at the crack of dawn to sing “Happy Birthday.” This year, Bill would like the rest of you to rise at your convenience in whatever your ensemble, stand up and sing Happy Birthday. She’ll hear you. If you want to make sure, you can even send a photo. Naked singers with decent voices are accepted but not preferred.
That’s all, folks….
