Mike Burgwin has died at the age of 87. He and his wife Lorna made a tour of friends a few years ago and I was delighted to see them. Mike and I have strong history, because he’s the one who hired me though management did NOT want to hire a woman, didn’t think a woman could handle the job and would not stick. When I finally went out into the field alone in a radio truck, they called me every hour or so to see if I were still alive.
Of course, in those days Portland, OR, was a port where rats still came down mooring lines into the city and there were two parts of town where the cops went in pairs: Errol Heights was the largest concentration of law-breakers outside prison and North Portland was the largest concentration of families with a member in prison — they were Black. The part of town where I was most useful was around Reed College where no one thought any laws applied to them and they treated any officials not at their own social level as intrusive thugs. The Portlandia nonsense didn’t exist, but Old Town was beginning to explore erotica. The rumor was that Patty Hearst was hiding somewhere in town.
Mike was a little scary to people who didn’t know him, because his years as a cop in Martinez, CA, another port, had taught him to be inscrutable no matter what he was dealing with — CSI kinds of stuff. He’d had a lot of jobs over the years and got something good out of each of them; for instance, he’d managed a paint company franchise and had a lot of Organizational Design training. At one point he drove a diaper service truck and met a lot of babies and their young mothers.
Just before he came to Animal Control, he was serving warrants. He told about going to a front door one summer. Through the screen door he could see a couple sitting on a sofa watching television. The man willingly came to the door and accepted the paper. Seeing that it was a summons to court for a divorce, he turned to the woman and asked, “Are you divorcing me?” “Yes,” she said, showing no reaction. “Oh”, said the man with no emotion, and sat back down. This story bugged Mike.
He told me cop stories, many of them violent, and I told him rez stories, but I was not the official emergency responder in Browning. It was just that when something happened, you had to deal with it because in those days no one else was there. We both laughed a lot. A lot of the stories were sexual — not rape and riot but ridiculous more than anything else. Guys who got their pricks stuck in the spigots of bathtubs.
But then we’d shift gears and try to figure out what would make animal control more effective, more professional, more respected. After I was a few years in the field we thought up the idea of education coordinator, a job that included taking photos, keeping statistics, writing a textbook, designing a formal training class for new hires, interfacing with the Oregon National Primate Research Center, the zoo veterinarian, and keeping the peace with the Oregon Humane Society which had traditionally held the contract for animal control. Also, dealing with Graziella Boucher, a tiny ancient tyrant who kept a wolf for a pet. (It was a husky.)
We needed a new animal control ordinance, so Mike pulled together a panel of people with the able guidance of Francis Smith, a local lawyer who raised beagles. Since Mike had kept records of all the people who had testified for and against us over the years, he drafted the extremes and some middle people (harder to find) into the project, which took a year. I attended all meetings and did a lot of original research of laws, news stories, and so on. The ordinance was fine, but struggling through the issues was game-changing.
The biggest step forward was organizing the National Animal Control Association for professionals. Previously Mike had developed a relationship with the American Humane Association, which was friendly to AC and also dealt with cruelty to children. Humane Society of the US was the other big player but played down anything practical except for shelter advice. Their agenda was not yet attacking everything pitiful as a means of raising money, but they ignored actual AC problems in the field. The single biggest mistake of outsiders is mistaking the shelter for the whole program.
It wasn’t just dogs. Mike shows up on Google explaining a runaway elephant in Hawaii. The relationship with wildlife entities was problematic. Fish and Wildlife sat at their desks without any way to respond to a raccoon tearing screens off windows or a pet skunk wandering around biting people. or the deer with cougars tracking them that mistook freeways for rivers and traveled in the landscape buffers up to the Lloyd Center where they panicked and crashed windows. If things got really exciting, Mike went to the field and helped. In fact, some officers who had found interesting things they could do in the truck aside from work (like napping), were disconcerted when Mike quietly arrived in an unmarked car.
Personally, Mike and I became close because his marriage was breaking up, bringing up unresolved issues from his childhood when his mom disappeared and his dad, traveling to labor jobs in remote places, left the boys in an orphanage where they were glad for berry season because they were never fed quite enough. Things did get better, but Mike married too young. Hard times did not callous him, but rather made him protective of people who were struggling. That included me, just coming out of a long-term totally dedicated (I thought) marriage and trying to figure it out. The key dilemma was that I wanted an active intellectual life, but it was not a way to make money.
At that point I began working on a masters in clinical psychology and realizing that it was taught as social work. Welfare cases, parole monitoring. I discovered Unitarian Universalism and switched to ministry which was friendly to all the Seventies psych thought. This baffled Mike but he never criticized it. Intelligent as he was, there was a wall where access to universities should have been. Just about the same with religion. His biggest disappointment in me was that he was always on the lookout for tennis players and I was hopeless. “Are there even any strings in your racquet?” he asked. Then it was over.
After I left for seminary, people pounded on Mike because his reforms were against their interests. Finally, the shelter supervisor was caught selling the drugs that were used to kill the animals because the needle was supposed to be more humane than the high-altitude chamber. Toby was gregarious and friendly enough that people named their adopted dogs for him. He lost his job, but so did Mike as the person who “should have known.”
At about that time, Seattle Animal Control blew up and Mike moved up there to apply all the principles and strategies that NACA had developed. It worked fine. By this time he had married Lorna and things kept improving. Lorna’s family had a store on the Sound and in retirement that kept Mike busy. He was always building something. In fact, at AC if two factions started feuding, they might come to work and find that overnight an actual wall had been erected between them.
When someone has had a tough childhood, they might react by imposing hard times on everyone else, but a few find a better way and stretch out a hand to pull people out of trouble. Mike’s sons are the same. Many will miss him in the most practical way. But also, he was an idealist and many loved him for it. Or just for his great guffawing laugh. I always wished I’d heard him sing Welsh drinking songs in the bar he once owned in Tahoe, he said because then no one could make him stop singing.
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