Veterinarian Bob Baker inspected the back leg of a tawny long-haired cat on a recent Friday afternoon, searching, as the owners watched, for a small but deep wound that took a few moments to find beneath its thick fur.
When he finally located it, he didn’t seem too concerned. “See the blood vessel there?” he asked, pointing to the exposed pink flesh. “The cut is nice and clean, and pretty fresh.” The cat was stitched up in under an hour.
Dr. Baker, a tall bespectacled man who brought the first permanent veterinary clinic to the San Geronimo Valley, retired this month after tending to pets—from fixing up small cuts and picking out spikey foxtails to setting broken bones and putting animals to sleep—for 32 years.
“I’d like to travel, and do other things,” he told the Light. “It’s been six days a week for over 30 years. But I’ve had a wonderful time.”
He will still work one day a week for the foreseeable future, but a new veterinarian, Kelle Kearney, bought the business last month.
(Dr. Kearney spent much of her childhood and adolescence in the valley—in fact, one time Dr. Baker paid a visit to her horse. Most recently she worked in clinics in Stinson Beach and San Anselmo.)
Veterinary medicine runs in Dr. Baker’s family: his father was a cow veterinarian in the Central Valley, where Dr. Baker grew up, and both his younger and older brothers became vets, too. He also has a cousin who is a vet. “It seems to be a family thing,” he said. He didn’t originally envision entering the profession; first his older brother pursued the field. Then, as he tried to figure out what to do with his undergraduate degree in psychology, his younger brother went to vet school. He decided that if his two siblings could do it, he could, too.
In school he specialized in large animals, but he has preferred working with small ones. “You don’t have to struggle physically. You don’t get kicked as much,” he chuckled.
Dr. Baker said that before he opened his practice, another veterinarian drove a mobile clinic to the valley a couple times a month. He himself worked at a vet office in Fairfax, which served a number of valley customers. But at the urging of his mother-in-law, he secured a loan for $8,000 from Bank of America and opened what he described as a “hole in the wall” in Forest Knolls, where he worked for seven years.
Starting off small helped him make a profit from the very first year, he said.
The clinic in Forest Knolls had one feature that bothered him: an exterior roughly the color of a Band-Aid. Inspired by a trip to Portugal, with its charming colorful houses, he painted the outside. But it turned out a bright, garish pink, both to his horror and the horror of passersby. “Townspeople yelled,” shouting threats or comments, such as “That looks horrible!” he said. He ran to the paint store, which added subduing pigment to the remaining paint. It ended up roughly the original color.
For many years his clinic sponsored a dog Olympics in the nearby park, with jump and “look-alike” contests. (That is, which owner and pet duo looked most similar.)
He moved to his San Geronimo office in the late ‘90s and has been there ever since.
The profession has changed a bit over the years, he said, becoming more sophisticated, particularly with technological shifts and better equipment. On a recent afternoon, he demonstrated a fancy scope that projects an image of the inside of a nose or ear onto a screen. It makes it much easier these days to pick out foxtails, he said.
Dr. Baker mostly tended to cats and dogs, but other animals came his way, too. At one point in his tenure, he dealt with a trend in potbellied pigs. “We’d have to chase them around,” he said, “and when you catch them, they squeal,” sometimes so loudly that pet owners worried the vet was harming their precious pigs. (One time, he recalled, he and an assistant went on a house call to castrate a pig. “But then, after all that chasing and squealing, it had already been castrated.”)
Another time, his assistant told him that someone was on the way with a python that potentially had a fungus growing on its head. Dr. Baker quickly began looking up information on snakes, about which he knew very little, but a man soon walked in with the pet. After taking a quick look at its head, Dr. Baker said the dots looked like specks of paint. He managed to wipe away the “fungus” with a Q-tip.
Now, after over 30 years of owning the valley clinic, where he was the only veterinarian, he has decided it’s time to move on. Dr. Baker, who brews beer as a hobby, now has a new business card as Lagunitas Brewing Company’s “ambassador and in-house vet.”