Harold Warsinske had a built-in staff for early morning calls.
One of his four children would accompany the veterinarian to emergencies in dark fields around Stanwood.
By the light of his car’s headlights, Warsinske and crew started by catching the cows that needed attention.
“Hold the rope,” he’d yell to his children, Dianne, William, Charles and Richard.
“We’d be dragged around the field,” Richard Warsinske said. “We’d have to hold the cow’s tail — with manure on it. Ick.”
Harold Warsinske loved the big animal work, but he also treated housepets at the Northwest Veterinary Clinic of Stanwood and Arlington.
He leaves a legacy of 60 years of groundbreaking veterinary medicine, his daughter said.
“Not only in Stanwood, but he was internationally acclaimed as an innovative practitioner of dairy medicine,” White said. “The first embryo transfer in a Holstein cow was done here in Stanwood by dad and his partners. That first flushing produced four calves, with one of them becoming the number one Holstein bull in the world.”
After he retired from the business, Warsinske traveled the world selling cow eggs in Taiwin, Korea China and Japan.
“Dad never got rich on anything,” his daughter said. “But he sure had a lot of fun.”
Harold Warsinske died on Christmas Day. He was 91.
Born May 18, 1918, to Arthur and Martha Warsinske, who at one time owned a zoo in Spokane, Warsinske was a graduate of the School of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State College. He moved to Stanwood and married his childhood sweetheart, Ethel James.
During the 1960s, he established Northwest Poultry Supply and Boumatic Milking Machine company. He also was a land developer and founder of BOVA International, an embryo transfer enterprise.
He served a term as president of the Washington State Veterinary Medicine Association, was elected to the American Veterinary Medical Association board and was state veterinarian of the year in 1971.
He is survived by his children and their spouses, Dianne and Kirby White, Charles and Adele Warsinske, and Richard and Sharon Warsinske; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
He was preceded in death by his wife and his son, William Harold Warsinske.
“Dad was a community leader,” Diane White said. “He was a longtime member of the Stanwood School Board of Directors. He and Dr. Nels Konnerup co-wrote “A Century of Veterinary History; Livestock Development in the Northwest.” It documents innovations, many of them developed by Dad, in the treatment of high-production dairy cows in the region.”
Her father’s greatest gift to the Stanwood community was his vision, his entrepreneurial nature, White said.
“He saw way into the future,” she said. “He pushed along, pushed along.”
As a guest of the British government in 1988, Warsinske showed his frozen embryo business at an international exhibition.
At the family home they had all types of animals, including Annabelle the cow, pheasants and a donkey. The veterinarian wasn’t known as a great vacationer, his daughter said, but he would empty equipment from the practice car and load it with camping gear. They went rock-picking, collecting boulders for a wall he built on their Stanwood hillside property.
Her father ate most anything. He wore homemade coveralls his wife sewed, with test-tube slots and zippers, that made him resemble an astronaut.
“They were works of art,” his daughter said. “Made from rip-stop nylon, he could come home for lunch and Mom would have them washed and dried before he left.”
Warsinske liked to get back home in time to watch the evening Huntley- Brinkley Report on TV.
At all times of the night, farmers would call the house. When the veterinarian rolled out to a barn or pasture, it was not uncommon for a farmer to say “As long as you are out here, check the other four cows.”
On one call they found a sick cow in a muddy ravine. The cow was pregnant, but with a dead, unborn calf. Richard Warsinske told his father that the farmer just didn’t care about the herd.
“Dad said it’s about the cow, not the farmer,” his son said.
One Christmas Eve they were called to help a cow deliver a calf. As often happened, the farmer gave the vet and his assistant a bucket of warm water and pointed them to a field.
“It was like being an emergency room doctor,” White said.
“It was hard work,” her brother added. “Dad got kicked and was forever getting knocked down.”
His father’s integrity and his hard work ethic showed Richard Warsinske what it meant to be a man, he said.
When his dog was sick recently, and a modern-day veterinarian couldn’t make the pooch better, Richard Warsinske asked his father what to do.
Harold Warsinske, famous for his knowledge of animal genetics, nutrition and reproduction, offered his son some old-fashioned advice.
Get some buttermilk down the dog’s throat.
That did the trick.
“He knew the old and new ways,” his son said.
Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451, oharran@heraldnet.com.
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