Historic Gardiner Animal Hospital continues to serve

The blind master

What Goodnow didn’t know was why Hoppenstedt wanted to sell. Successful and not yet old enough to retire, his new boss should have been able to keep the office open for years.

“He was blind,” the veterinarian said of his mentor. “He had cataract surgery, maybe a year or two before I came here, down in Poughkeepsie.”

Hoppenstedt’s eye surgery would be considered fairly crude nowadays. It was a purely surgical extraction of the clouded lens — done with the veterinarian sitting up, and basic anesthesia. “They would physically just take the lens out of your eye and just sew the top of it up. There were no implants or anything like that — like we have nowadays.”

Hoppenstedt ended up losing the eye they worked on because he fell into a sneezing fit during the surgery. “He prolapsed the vitreous, which is the back of the eye. The eye became useless,” Goodnow said.

When Goodnow finally met his mentor, he had a glass eye to replace the one lost in surgery and a cataract in the other so bad that he could barely see. “He had a person driving him around to do farm calls,” the vet explained.

Before he became blind, Pine Bush native Hoppenstedt built a name for himself. He graduated through Cornell University’s large animal vet program in 1935, worked a few years in New Paltz, then New York City and then opened his own practice in Pleasant Valley before moving to Gardiner in 1940 to take over his mentor Dr. Flemming’s practice.

Clifford Hoppenstedt was known mostly by his nickname Kip. His brother Gilbert Hoppenstedt also became a veterinarian, although he studied at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Hoppenstedt boys grew up on a dairy farm in Pine Bush. That rural life — and Kip’s influence on his brother — eventually led both men to work with animals. But going to an Ivy League school seemed pretty far-fetched at first.

“I was very, very active in 4-H, which was just starting. An agent came to our school when I was about 8 years old,” said Kip Hoppenstedt, during an interview in 2009 — just a few months before he died. “I got quite active in 4-H work and that helped influence my thinking of Cornell. I didn’t know what I was doing. Young people worked and they never dreamed of going on to college.”

On top of running the show in Gardiner, Hoppenstedt kept his other practice in Dutchess County going for 35 years.

In the 1970s, when Goodnow came to Gardiner, the surrounding area still had a number of dairy farms. So their practice focused more than half of its calls on large animal cases.

Goodnow moved in with his family in the upstairs apartment above the hospital. That room has seen many families live there over the years. Both Goodnow and Hoppenstedt provided the space to the young doctors doing residency at the practice.

“There’s probably been 25 to 30 families that lived up there — one after another,” he explained.

Despite his visual disability, Hoppenstedt continued to work at Gardiner Animal Hospital until his retirement in 1983. Kip Hoppenstedt was living in New Paltz when he died in September 2009.

A family business

Matthew Goodnow, Lyle’s grandson, essentially grew up at Gardiner Animal Hospital. He loved tagging along with his grandfather to farm calls. He loved the animals.

“I’ve been working here since I was five — for what my grandfather would call ‘gofer’ money,” he said. “I spent my entire childhood here, riding around the country with him in the back of a station wagon — seeing amazing things. And now my children are doing the same.”

Dr. Goodnow said he thinks Matthew — now the office manager — actually started helping out at the vet’s office since he could walk. He did chores for allowance money.

As an adult, Matthew became a paramedic — largely due to his grandfather’s influence. It was the medicine he saw in rural Gardiner that sparked an interest in healing.

“Growing up, I always wanted to be a vet, because he’s my hero,” Matthew said of his grandfather. But in high school, the younger Goodnow became a volunteer firefighter. Eventually, that led him to a career as a paramedic.

Much as it has for decades now, the Gardiner Animal Hospital will continue to treat sick pets, horses, pigs, goats and cows. Later this year, they expect to upgrade to a digital X-ray system.

To learn more about Gardiner Animal Hospital, head to https://www.gardineranimalhospital.com/index.html or search for them on Facebook.