Archibald Ferguson Alexander, who died in Fort Collins Sept. 16 at age 76, enjoyed his long career as a veterinary pathologist, often explaining his specialty by saying that he knew and did everything that a regular veterinarian did, “but too late.”
Most of Alexander’s patients – chiefly cattle, horses and other large animals – had expired by the time he saw them during his tenure with the Colorado State University veterinary school. During a necropsy – the animal equivalent of an autopsy – Alexander’s utter absorption channeled into the students and assorted relatives he often invited as witnesses.
His enthusiasm for the clinical aspect of animal husbandry began during his boyhood in Minnesota. At age 4, he announced that he intended to become a veterinarian.
“He said it was almost like he had blinders on, that he’d never thought about doing something else,” recalled his daughter, Jean Alexander-Gitchell.
He was tall and slim, with a penchant for wearing tam-o’-shanters, Peruvian knitted caps and other unconventional hats. Alexander liked to boast that he was the very first graduate of the University of Minnesota’s fledgling veterinary school. He left it to listeners to figure out that newly minted veterinarians customarily receive their degrees in alphabetical order.
In 1956, after serving five years in the Army’s veterinary corps, Alexander and his bride, Susan Hart Alexander, moved to Fort Collins, where he taught at the university’s veterinary school. In 1962, he earned a doctoral degree in pathology. Four years later, Alexander became chairman of the school’s pathology department, a post he held until 1980, when he went on to direct the school’s diagnostic laboratory.
The Alexanders lived in an old farmhouse on about 5 acres of a former sheep ranch east of Fort Collins on the Cache la Poudre River. Dozens of animals lived there, too. Horses, of course, and an assortment of sheep, chickens, ducks, cats and dogs.
The Alexander children and their cousins, who visited often, found it an idyllic existence.
They became adept riders. They learned to carry a broom when they went to the garden – they needed it to fend off territorial chickens and geese. Alexander taught them how to chop wood, a skill that was among the last lessons he eventually taught his grandchildren.
They played with the latest batch of kittens and painted the white rail fences. The boys took turns getting up at midnight to add oil to the farm pump when the irrigation system was running.
When his children became adults with homes of their own, Alexander replaced the painted fence with a natural wood fence, and put in a sprinkler system. He mounted the oil gauges from the old pump and gave them to his sons for Christmas that year.
As youngsters, the children clamored to accompany Alexander when he went into town to perform necropsies on weekends. As he worked, Alexander explained what he was doing.
Because his specialty was altitude-related bovine diseases, many of his patients were cattle that had died of heart and lung diseases similar to respiratory diseases in humans. Onlookers sometimes divined unanticipated juxtapositions between death and life. Daughter Alexander-Gitchell remembers being equally fascinated and appalled when her uncle sliced open a dead calf’s stomach, revealing the milk it had suckled just before its death.
Alexander traveled to Mexico, Chile, Ethiopia and Kenya, where he helped nascent veterinary programs and conducted research projects.
“He was a learned man in the best sense of that term,” said longtime friend Carl Cunningham, who served with Alexander at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground.
“He synthesized and applied learning, using it to expand his own horizons, and certainly to teach others, while not attempting to flaunt it.”
At the end of his life, Alexander spent more than 12 years caring for his wife, who was increasingly incapacitated by Alzheimer’s disease. It took a toll on a once-buoyant persona that briefly resurrected during his final months.
“Uncle Arch taught me that you’re always going to have a lot of things you want to do, but you’ll never get ’em all done,” said Alistair Bleifuss. “But you keep pluggin’ away. You keep at ’em.”
Survivors include sons Ian Alexander of Denver and Bruce Alexander of Minneapolis; daughters Ruth Calkins of Glen Rose, Texas, and Jean Alexander-Gitchell of Eagle; sister Mary Ellen Bleifuss of Minneapolis; and nine grandchildren. His wife preceded him in death.
Services will be held at 2 p.m. Friday at Foothills Unitarian Church in Fort Collins.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
