“Doc” Lombard: The Vet Who Was Always Off to the Races
Part One in a series from the Cordova Times
By Hank Nuwer
At his office in Massachusetts, Dr. Roland Arnold Lombard was regarded as the veterinarian of choice for the city’s dog and cat owners.
In Alaska and Canada and other parts of New England, however, he was known as the musher to beat whenever he and his dog teams came to compete in a big race.
Dr. Lombard was born in Maine on September 17, 1911. As a boy, he met legendary Alaskan Leonhard (“Leonard”) Seppala, a Norwegian-born musher who often gave public talks about his involvement in the much-ballyhooed 1925 serum run by dogsled to Nome. Seppala was also a competitive musher and three-time winner of the pioneering All-Alaska Sweepstakes.
“Seppala told me something about how to train the dogs, and he have me two old collars for the necks of the dogs,” the boy told a sports reporter back then. Lombard then and later spoke with a pronounced “Back East” accent.
Encouraged by his hero, the thin, slightly built Lombard took up the sport, entering a race at age fifteen at Laconia, New Hampshire. He built a sled and harness by hand and began training one dog at first.
Lombard found a partner next. He trained with a dog-crazy neighbor named Charles D. Brown. The two gathered their courage and traveled to New Hampshire to seek advice from Arthur T. Walden, a musher who was about to join Admiral Richard Byrd on his first Antarctic Expedition.
Before long, his team was up to five mongrels. Lead dog Chip was part mastiff and part shepherd. Bob and Rinso were German shepherds. Buck was a collie. Wolf was shepherd and collie.
He built up their strength and endurance by running alongside them, riding the sled only when he thought they were ready and the trail was nice and easy.
At sixteen, in 1928, he competed at the annual sled-dog races at Poland Spring against several experienced mushers with veteran matched teams of dogs. He didn’t win but he left his mark.
“16-year-old Roland A. Lombard Proved Sensation at Poland Spring Derby,” noted the Portland (Maine) Press on February 5, 1928.
By 1949 he was married to his wife Louise who shared his love for the sport. His handler was Colonel Norman Vaughan who had accompanied Byrd and Walden on that two-year Antarctic expedition. Vaughan served as another valuable mentor for the mushers.
That year he was regarded as one of the top New England-based competitors in the sport, according to the Nome Nugget. By this time, his dog teams were made up of Siberian huskies.
“We (he and Louise) have given up all our other hobbies—and some of our vices—in order to concentrate on our dogs,” Lombard told a Montreal Star writer.
Around this time, mutual friends introduced Louise and him to Alaska musher Earl Norris, the winner of the 1947 and 1948 Fur Rondy competitions.
Norris and his wife persuaded the couple to test their skills by entering races in Alaska.
His wife may have been devoted to him, but not early in his career when he came to the Far North to race.
You see, Louise Arnold was a determined competitor who brought a team of her own to face off against his dogs and anyone else’s.
Today, long after the victories of Libby Riddles and Susan Butcher, few race aficionados are surprised when a female shows up on a sled. But when Louise and her malamutes competed against Dr. Arnold and a lineup of male drivers at the three-day, 90-mile “grind” during the Ottawa winter festival in February 1949, “there was a lifting of eyebrows among veteran sourdoughs” over such a thing, according to the Nome Nugget.
When Lombard lost a battle with cancer and died at 78 on October 10, 1990, the tributes from his competitors went on for years andshowed their appreciation for his mettle and talent.
“He was about the best there was,” said Attla, his longtime fierce rival.
The Anchorage Daily News ran a cartoon of five sled dogs baying in sorrow. The caption read, “A funeral mass for Rolan Lombard.”
That paper’s editorial writer gave “Doc” a fine farewell. “While his competitive fires burned fiercely, he never compromised his dogs’ health. Indeed, he heightened Alaskans’ awareness of the role that animal welfare and ethical treatment of animals must play in racing. . . He taught Alaskans many a lesson about their native sport—and left dog mushing more popular and more professional for his efforts.”
