Squamish knows him as the quintessential doctor - but LaVerne Kindree could just as easily have turned out to have been a railway man or even a symphony musician.
Luckily for us, a professor in Saskatoon who met a young violin player turned him towards a career in medicine - leading him to become the driving force behind Squamish's first hospital and a man who has worked to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for health care in our community, even into his ninth decade.
LaVerne Kindree was born Sept. 1, 1921 in Delisle, Saskatchewan, near Saskatoon. His twin brother died at the age of seven months of an ear infection - a deadly childhood ailment in the days before antibiotics.He recalls that he was a fairly typical prairie boy who played curling with jam cans filled with water and hockey on the local rink with frozen horse droppings.
Young LaVerne attended City Park High School in Saskatoon but studied telegraphy and was employed by the Canadian National Railway as a telegraph operator for a summer job and was contemplating following his father, a station agent, into the railway business.
At the same time he was a dedicated musician who sang in his church quartet and played violin at home with his sister accompanying on the family piano, showing enough talent that at the age of 18 he tried out for the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra.
"That was a scary experience," he said.However the conductor thought enough of his talents to give him a position in the second violin section, where he would play for four seasons.
'Well, why not?'
It still seemed he was destined for the railroad until he met Dr. Laycock, a professor from the University of Saskatchewan."He interviewed me and suggested to me that I consider [medicine]. Since I didn't have any strong indications about what I was going to do, other than I had this background in railroading, I thought 'Well, why not?'"
That sent Kindree to the University of Saskatchewan where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1945, all while still playing in the Saskatoon Symphony.
He then proceeded to the University of Toronto for his medical training - while still playing violin in the U of T Symphony Orchestra.He graduated in 1947 and came out to Vancouver to St. Paul's Hospital for his internship, having had fond memories on Vancouver from a previous trip out with his family.
"I really liked B.C. I liked the scenery - the prairies are really flat - and early on I had decided I would like to come out here and decide if I wanted to live here."
A few twists of fate
It was as an intern at St. Paul's that he met Norma Mee, a nursing graduate, on his rounds, and began his courtship.
"We used to go dancing together," he recalls.
Dr. Kindree soon started coming up on weekends by Unions Steam Ships to help in Squamish, a community of 1,500 that at the time had no doctor of its own. Dr. McDonald had been coming over from the mill community of Woodfibre to help cover the town's medical needs after the death of Dr. Paul, Squamish's first doctor, who died of a heart attack during an air raid practice in 1941. But there was still no full-time doctor living in the community.
It was during one of his weekend trips in 1947 that Dr. Kindree attended his first delivery in Squamish - a man who celebrated his 60th birthday this year and who still lives in Squamish (the doctor declined to identify his patient for this article).His positive experience in Squamish led to two life-changing decisions at the end of his internship: he resolved to move to Squamish and become the town's full-time physician - but first, he asked Norma to marry him.
The happy couple had a two-week honeymoon, half of which was spent on Vancouver Island, the other half was taken up by setting up a medical practice in Squamish. The Kindrees bought Dr. Paul's house on Third Avenue, which he had first moved into in 1913, and set up a clinic behind in the town drugstore on the corner of Cleveland Avenue and Victoria Street - the current location of H&R Block, with Dr. Kindree's clinic where the native art store is today.
Astounding community effort
One of the biggest problems facing the small community was the lack of proper medical facilities. While Mount Shear, the company townsite at the Britannia Copper Mine, had its own hospital, Squamish had none, meaning patients had to be shipped south via steam ships to hospitals in Vancouver. The ships were the only links to the city in the era before roads and rails connected Squamish to the Lower Mainland.
"You depended on the weather and the boats," he recalls."You always had to allow for lag time."
There had been talk about building a hospital in Squamish, but nothing ever materialized until shortly after Dr. Kindree's arrival when a committee was struck to raise funds for it. After two years, the small town raised $30,000 - $20 for each man, woman and child in town - and got approval from the provincial government to have a hospital designed.After the architect was hired and the drawings completed, the province stunned the community by rescinding its approval.
"God only knows," Dr. Kindree said when asked why they changed their mind.
An emergency visit to Victoria was fruitless, but Dr. Kindree led another charge, this time to find out how to sue the government to recover the money spent on the architect. A visit by Dr. Kindree to Ernie Carson, the MLA for the Squamish area at the time, was the critical turning point.
"I said to him 'Ernie, this community's raised $30,000. If you were to take the population of Vancouver, you can translate that to $9 million. If they came to the government and said they had $9 million to build a hospital I think you'd do something for them.'"
Carson took the case to the provincial cabinet, using Dr. Kindree's example, and managed to convince Premier Johnson to change his mind."We got our hospital in the nick of time," said Kindree.
Kindree doesn't recall the exact details of how the town managed to raise all the money, but said he's very proud of the amount and the community effort.
"That $30,000 represents somewhere in the neighbourhood of $277,000 in today's dollars. That's the enormity of what they did at that time with the population they had, and that's what got them the hospital."
"Everybody in town joined in," adds Norma. "Everybody in the community had something to do with the hospital."
The successful hospital campaign is also what kept the Kindrees here. Dr. Kindree had been approached by a Vancouver doctor to join his city practice, and he tried it for a few weeks.
"I had figured for a young doctor to stay in a community without a hospital would be a dead end, and if we couldn't get a hospital, I'd have to move," he recalls. "But if we could get a hospital, I was committed to stay."
As it turns out, Dr. Kindree didn't care for city practice.
"I would spend a whole morning on the road going between hospitals to see two or three patients."
And thankfully, the province's decision and the community's effort made it possible for him to stay in Squamish for 60 years and counting. Files by Bill McNeneyNEXT WEEK: Life as a Squamish doctor: treating polio, cows and highway crash victims; the start of a lifetime of public service; the story of "Kinderella" and the taxman.
