Susan Weinstein

In the 1960s and ’70s, while Sue Weinstein was earning her doctoral degree in veterinary medicine at Cornell University, she had a part-time job that was, you might say, a “waste” of time.

“One of my ‘fun’ part-time jobs was in a chicken manure lab,” she recalls. “They had four different chicken houses under one roof. And they handled the waste in four different methods.

“We analyzed the waste, the chemical composition and things like that. It wasn’t one of those jobs that got you a lot of positive attention: ‘Well, what did you do this summer?’”

She graduated in 1970 from what was then the Cornell College of Agriculture — “it’s got a fancier name now,” she says — and as a doctor of veterinary medicine from Cornell’s veterinary college in 1974. She practiced for a couple of years in the New York metropolitan area before moving with her husband, Jeff Baskin, to Arkansas in 1976.

He was looking at job offers in Buffalo; Huntington, W.Va.; and Little Rock, which to Weinstein sounded like would be the warmest of the three. “I knew I was not going to Buffalo. I don’t like the cold,” she says. Huntington sounded cold, too. “And who the heck knew anything about Little Rock, except for the ’57 crisis?

“We thought we’d be here a year or two, and we loved it and didn’t want to ever move,” Weinstein says.

Baskin took the Little Rock job, helping design a new library for what is now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. After working for UAMS for 10 years, he took over the Laman Library system in North Little Rock, which he ran until his death in 2014.

In 2005, after 28 years in private practice, she hired on with the Arkansas Department of Health as the Arkansas state public health veterinarian. Her name appears frequently in newspaper stories about rabies outbreaks in skunks and bats and about tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, including Lyme, Zika, West Nile and chikungunya.

“I work with zoonotic diseases — [the ones] people get from animals,” she explains. “My first and primary obligation is rabies — I give advice for medical professionals, veterinarians, animal control and citizens on any possible exposures, and whether they need preventative vaccinations, and why.

“And I also cover all of the mosquito- and tick-borne illnesses. We do get a lot of the bug issues. Bedbugs — they’re always fun.

“The other thing that I do a lot of here, I interact with a lot of other agencies on the public aspects of things you might not think of as public health.” For example, “I work with the Arkansas Livestock & Poultry [Commission]; they do the animal health aspect of diseases where I deal with the public health aspect. So when they talk about avian influenza, they very much look at the poultry industry and the economic impact that would have, whereas we worry about workers and people going in to treat this and keeping them from getting [it].

“That’s one part of the job I love. Those relationships, working with other agencies, take a lot of time to develop and to build a trust where you will share, ‘We think this is going to happen, we’re going to give you a head’s up.’ That part is very rewarding, to help at the front end to alleviate fears.

“You have to insinuate your way into those relationships, because they didn’t exist before, that kind of cooperation or connection. Not for any particular reason, but just because nobody went out there and sought it out.”

“She’s outstanding,” says Dr. Joseph H. Bates, associate dean for public health practice at UAMS’ Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health, who hired Weinstein for the Health Department job. “She took a tiny office and expanded it in a major way, and had a big impact in Arkansas on public health. Ebola, Zika, big episodes of animal diseases that come to man — she was very important doing this work.” During the recent Zika outbreak, “she had people tracking mosquitoes all through sites throughout Arkansas, and monitored individuals that might have been exposed.

“She’s also an excellent teacher. We have public health grand rounds every week, she would present once or twice every year and was one of the most popular presenters. She’s exceptionally bright, and she’s just a general nice, fine, fine person and highly respected in the community.”

PRACTICE PROBLEMS

Weinstein was born in the Bronx, but moved upstate with her family when she was 2 to Cobleskill, N.Y., an hour west of Albany. She lived there until she started at Cornell, where she attended on a full scholarship.

There were few women in her veterinary medicine classes — perhaps as many as five when she started. “By my senior year, there was a huge number, like, 20,” she says. “It was tough. Professors didn’t want women, so we had to be three times better. They would give us more disgusting things to do. It toughens you up.

“Now 70-80 percent of all veterinary school students are women.”

And she recalls how hard it was to find work when she first arrived in Little Rock.

“We both assumed when I moved here, that I would have, as a lofty veterinarian, no trouble getting a job anywhere,” she says.“However, practices here were quite different than they were in New York. Down here there were a solo-man practice on every other corner but there were very few group practices. And so I actually found it very difficult to find a full-time job. For a while, I worked half a day here, half a day there. I had a mobile clinic for three years. That was crazy.”

A 1978 Arkansas Gazette article described Weinstein, then 30, loading up a 23-foot motor home and taking veterinary care to areas within driving distance of Little Rock but that lacked veterinarians. A folding dining table served as exam table. Covering the range top with paneling provided additional counter space. She kept drugs in the refrigerator and developed X-rays in the bathroom.

On Mondays she was in England; on Tuesday mornings she was in Redfield and Sweet Home in the afternoons. Sheridan on Wednesday, Ferndale on Thursday morning, Landmark on Friday. “The idea was to build up a clientele so I could start a practice and already have a clientele. Our finances were such that I couldn’t afford to just open without one.” Thursday afternoons, she made house calls to Little Rock area pet owners. “This was in an era before cell phones,” she notes. “It would be a little easier now. But we made it work.”

At the time, area banks wouldn’t lend money to women. “I couldn’t even get an application,” she says. “One of my esteemed colleagues asked me, ‘Why don’t you just go home and have some children?’ Things are different now, thankfully.” To fund the mobile practice, “I was able to get a full Small Business Administration loan on a minority program — and women in business were definitely a minority.”

Eventually she had built up a big enough clientele to build the Landmark Animal Hospital. When she started working for the state, she hired somebody to run the clinic, which she sold half a dozen years ago.

“I ended up in the Landmark community [south of Little Rock] for a couple of reasons — one, there was a big need for it there, and I had lots of business, and two, it was not that far from Little Rock. The community of England very much wanted me to build there, and the bank would have loaned me money at that point or helped me get funding, but it was an hour drive from where we lived. People there were lovely to me. I just didn’t think I wanted to commute an hour.”

READY TO RETIRE

Weinstein is retiring soon — it was supposed to happen last week, but her successor isn’t arriving until sometime next year. Although she has been “officially part time” since November, her average workday is still 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. “and I’m still on call all the time.”

“I have to say, I like working here. I like the people. I like what I do. I don’t always like all of the slowness of how government operates, the layers. Ugh. In private practice, buy a piece of equipment, you check the different prices, you look at the pros and cons, and you say, ‘OK. This one. Boom.’ It does not work that way here. And 12 years haven’t been enough to get used to it. I knew I would never get used to it, and I did not.”

She won’t be idle in retirement, though. “I do a lot of volunteer work now,” she says. “I could easily be a full-time volunteer.

“I would love to do some traveling. Find a travel partner. Jeff and I really traveled well together,” she says wistfully. “He set the bar high. That won’t be easy. We were just perfect companions.” Among her travels: “To visit my kids.” She and Baskin had three children — oldest son Bernie, a former book publisher, lives in Arlington, Va.; daughter Meredith, a registered nurse, lives in Los Angeles; and son Daniel, an artist, lives in Fayetteville.

“And I would love to start getting some exercise — I just haven’t had the time. I pretty much go all day long and late at night, and I’m determined that I will make time for it, because I know I need it.”

VOLUNTEER HONOR

Speaking of her volunteer work, the Jewish Federation of Arkansas is handing Weinstein and Valerie Steinberg, federation co-presidents in 2013-15, its 14th annual Jane B. Mendel Tikkun Olam Awards, Saturday night at the Little Rock Marriott, West Markham and Louisiana streets. “Tikkun Olam” is a Hebrew phrase that translates as “repairing the world.”

Weinstein became active in the Jewish community not long after she arrived in Little Rock, where she joined Synagogue Agudath Achim. She was secretary, treasurer and president of the Synagogue Sisterhood, a board member at Agudath Achim and Temple B’nai Israel — “a long time ago,” she says — and served on the Jewish Federation board several times in different capacities.

“I was very involved in the federation in the ’80s, when Jane Mendel mentored me, as she did many people,” Weinstein says. “This latest iteration might have been my third go-round on the federation board.”

Steinberg lobbied Weinstein to be her co-president. “She called me and said, ‘Would you do this with me?’ I said, ‘Valerie, we’re such good friends. That could really ruin our friendship. It really could.’ The only way I would agree to it was if we would both promise that we would still be friends at the end. ’Cause that mattered more to me.

“Our skill sets are really different. We balance well. As Valerie likes to say, ‘I’ll bring the veggie tray. She’s the organized one.’ We have a lot of fun with it. I would run the board meetings and tell people, ‘She’s the nice one.’”

“Most of the time,” Steinberg agrees. “But so is she.”

Their biggest accomplishment as co-presidents, Steinberg says, was the development of a social work program, “which was much needed. There’s an aging population in the Jewish community and everywhere else. It was a need that was identified and brought about during our tenure.”

Steinberg says neither of them ever expected to be a Tikkun Olam Award recipient. “It was a surprise,” she admits. “[Sue and I] were joking about it, because Marianne [Federation Executive Director Marianne Tettlebaum] and one of the other board members wanted to have dinner with us, and we couldn’t figure out why. We decided that whatever they asked us, we were going to say ‘No.’ When they told us, we just looked at each other and burst out laughing.”

Weinstein has also served on the regional Girl Scouts Council board, and was its president in 1999-2001. She has also served on the boards of the Weekend Theater and Just Communities of Arkansas (when it was still known as the National Conference of Christians and Jews).

“I love those kinds of issues of equality and justice,” she says. “I like community work. I really enjoy it. That’s one of the things I fully intend to do when I have more time for me.”

The 14th annual Jane B. Mendel Tikkun Olam Awards, Saturday, Little Rock Marriott, West Markham and Louisiana streets, Little Rock. 7 p.m. reception, 7:30 p.m. dinner, 8:30 p.m. Tikkun Olam Awards and Grand Honorees Presentation. Cocktail attire; Kosher dietary laws observed. Tickets:$125 ($60 tax deductible).

(501) 663-3571.