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Alumni in Action
Shear Determination

by K. Friday

At first glance there is nothing particularly unusual about Sparrow Hospital's off-campus, after-hours clinic in Hannah Plaza in East Lansing. The waiting room has a small aquarium for the kids and the requisite chairs and magazines for the adults. The walk-in patients ebb and flow and come to be treated for a variety of common afflictions, from wounds and chronic pain to viruses and infections.

But the patients who come here will most likely never guess that the man who treats them - the man who has headed this clinic for the past year or so, Quinn Bosworth, D.O. - has a storied and unusual past.

You see, before he graduated from MSUCOM in 1998, Dr. Bosworth lived a life few people live these days… as an itinerant sheep-shearer.

Dr. Bosworth, whose mother's maiden name is, ironically, "Shepard," grew up on a family farm in Charlotte, Michigan. In 1978, fresh out of high school and craving adventure, Dr. Bosworth hit the road, flying to Texas to join a wheat harvesting crew that would eventually work its way up the plains states to Canada. In 1980, Dr. Bosworth attended a sheep-shearing program in Colby, Kansas, having decided that sheep-shearing was a better paying and more respectable profession than harvesting.

"Most of the people I work with now think I was a lunatic for ever wanting to do that," Dr. Bosworth says about his first profession, "but I liked the challenge of it. I liked that the better you got the more you got paid, and the sheep-shearers who were really good earned a lot of respect. Eventually, I wanted that kind of respect."

After shearing for two or three seasons in the United States, in 1984 Dr. Bosworth decided to head to the mecca of sheep-shearing - New Zealand - to learn from the world's best. When he returned to America after a year of study and hard practice, he was able to work on his own and make a name for himself shearing sheep across the country.

Sheep-shearing is a difficult and demanding trade. It requires an ability to manipulate often unwilling sheep and work with sharp cutters at a rapid pace. Shearers are paid by the number of sheep they shear a day, but shearers who cannot shear efficiently quickly tire, no matter how strong they are. The practice requires both stamina and great skill, and Dr. Bosworth calls elite sheep-shearers "some of the best athletes in the world."

With barely 2,000 shearers active in the United States today and a comparable minority worldwide, sheep-shearers circulate among a relatively closed, elite community, one in which fame grows with record tallies. Of course, most of the impressive tallies are held by New Zealanders like Edsel Ford. "This guy once sheared 664 sheep in nine hours," Dr. Bosworth whispers with awe.

For his part, Dr. Bosworth recites his shearing résumé, which, like all good shearers, he knows by heart: "My best day in the U.S. was in Kentucky; I did 267 sheep in one day. My best day overall was in New Zealand, where I did 335 sheep in one day."

However, Dr. Bosworth admits that in his early career, especially before he trained in New Zealand, the numbers were less than spectacular. "At the end of my career I could shear a sheep in two to three minutes," he says. "In the beginning, I'm a bit embarrassed to say, I sheared 34 sheep in 11 hours. These were great big sheep, and I'd thought I'd never walk again after that day."

Dr. Bosworth says that at one time his plan was to shear his way around the world. "Some of the guys I had met and worked with in various places had sheared in exotic places like the Falkland Islands and Granada. If you wanted, you could easily shear your way across Europe."

Like herders and other nomadic laborers, sheep-shearers move from farm to farm, village to village, state to state, and country to country. "Once you do a few flocks in the area and the people like your work, they keep sending you down the road to all the people in the area," Dr. Bosworth explains. "Word of mouth just keeps you going."

These days Dr. Bosworth's life is much different. He has two young sons, and because of them and because of his medical career his days of travel are now on hold. But it is clear that the road still has an appeal for him, and he clearly enjoys describing the joy of what looks to many as very, very hard work.

"The people I met were incredible," he explains. "Out in the western United States, on the farms and on the range I have met Peruvian and Chilean shepherds, Basque herders, and New Zealanders. I have met Australian aborigines and Maori from New Zealand.

"When I was in New Zealand and Australia I would go to the pub and everybody and his brother would want to buy me, the 'Yankee Sheep-Shearer,' a drink. You had to stop that after a while. Overall, though, it was the people and the challenge of shearing that made it all worthwhile."