10/19/95
Roy Summerford (summero@mail.auburn.edu)
AFTER HALF CENTURY IN VET MEDICINE, COUPLE LOOK TO FUTURE
AUBURN -- Tyler and Fran Young of Opelika built their life together around the care of animals. As they looked back at over half a century in veterinary medicine, they decided to help future generations pursue the same kind of life.
The Youngs have established a deferred major gift to set up a professorship and scholarships in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Auburn University. Their commitment through an estate plan continues a long association with both Auburn and veterinary medicine.
Young, a Virginia native, received his veterinary medicine degree from Auburn in 1940 and returned in the early 1980s intending to retire -- only to spend another eight years as an adjunct veterinary professor and U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector at Auburn.
T.R. Boosinger, interim dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, said the deferred major gift, valued at $1.5 million, will have a long-term impact on the college, just as past gifts are helping the current generation.
"Future generations will benefit from their benevolence," he said. "Their gift will enable Auburn to improve its ability to recruit and retain superior faculty. In addition, the scholarship support will help students pursue their education in veterinary medicine.
"Scholarships grow in importance every year," said Boosinger, who noted that students enter veterinary school with debt accumulated during three or four years of college. "Students go year-round their last two years and have little or no earning power during that time, so they really need and appreciate the help that scholarships provide."
The professorship will also benefit future generations by enabling the college to attract and keep superior faculty, said Boosinger, adding, "It takes superior faculty to have a superior academic program, so we look to endowed positions to help us continue improving the level of quality in the college."
Young said he and his wife want to help provide for the future of the profession. "Our life together has revolved around veterinary medicine, and this seemed like a good way to help bring others into the profession," he said.
Two factors -- the Great Depression and snow -- led to Young's first association with Auburn. Working toward a master's degree in pathobiology and bacteriology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the mid-1930s, he saw that veterinarians were faring better than medical doctors during the Depression. Farmers would put off seeing a doctor for their illnesses but they would not risk losing their investment in livestock, so veterinarians were in more demand than medical doctors.
While deciding to become a veterinarian, Young was also coping with a bitter Virginia winter. "I picked up an Auburn catalog and read where it said the climate is warm year round and it seldom snowed. It sounded just right to me." He contacted Dean Isaac McAdory, who told him to come on down, and Auburn soon became his home.
The Youngs met at Auburn during Tyler's student days, when Fran came from her home in Atlanta to a football game on a date with one of Tyler's classmates. Fran and Tyler began dating a couple of years later, when he was stationed by the Army as a health officer in Atlanta in the early days of World War II.
The couple were married before Young was shipped overseas, where he won five battle stars for action on the European front. Following his discharge from the Army as a lieutenant colonel after the war, they embarked on a life in which Mrs. Young was almost as involved in veterinary medicine as her husband. "Ever since we've been married, I've been in the veterinary profession, too," she said.
Between his days as a student and his stint on the faculty, Young saw service as sanitation inspector for the First Army in Europe, a 28-year career in private practice in Memphis and Kingsport, Tenn., and a 10-year career as an inspector and laboratory scientist with the Florida Department of Agriculture. Over that period, the Youngs witnessed a major shift in the veterinary profession as practices shifted from large animals to small animals.
The Youngs started their veterinary clinic in Kingsport, near his family home in southern Virginia, with Young treating animals on farms around the north Tennessee city.
"It was almost exclusively large animals when I was getting started," he said, recalling that in his early student days, the small animal clinic was a table in the corner of the large animal clinic. Over time, the business changed so much that the Kingsport clinic focused exclusively on small animals during the last eight years he was associated with it.
Mrs. Young worked with her husband in the Kingsport clinic at first -- even to the point of putting a crib in the office when their only child was born. As the clinic grew, Young hired office help and his wife turned her attention to raising their child. But the animals remained an important part of her life. "I used to keep Tyler's cages filled with every hurt animal I could pick up," she recalled. "Animals have always meant a lot to me, as well as to Tyler; they have been a big part of our lives."
Young sandwiched private practice between laboratory and field work for the Army at the start of his career and for the state of Florida in the l970s. When they returned to Auburn in the early 1980s to retire, he agreed to temporarily assist both Auburn and the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an adjunct professor and a laboratory scientist. But the temporary assignment continued for eight years until 1993, when he again announced his retirement. "They asked me why I was leaving, and I told them, I'm 80 years old and I'm tired of working," he said.
Mrs. Young also quickly found herself recruited into veterinary auxiliary activities in Lee County as she had elsewhere. Agreeing to help with aT-shirt fund- raising sale one year for the Auxiliary of the Alabama Veterinary Medicine Association, she soon became so associated with the role that friends dubbed her the "bag lady" because of the bags of T-shirts she carted to association activities. Although she has cut back on the T-shirt sales, she remains active in the association, and they are volunteers with the Salvation Army.
Mrs. Young, who was selected Layman of the Year for 1990 by the Alabama Veterinary Medicine Association, has won several other awards for her work with volunteer organizations. She also served as president of the Southern Veterinary Medicine Association Auxiliary in 1970, the same year her husband served as president of the SVMA. She said their joint service as presidents of both the association and the auxiliary was a coincidence of timing, but it was in keeping with their involvement together in the veterinary profession.
"Any time you get one of us, you get two," she said.
oct95:AU-young