Bethany Animal Hospital · Sycamore, Illinois
Sixty-six years of one family looking after Sycamore's animals.
The homepage shows the short version of this record: four dates and a line each. This page is the long version, the one where the years between those dates are filled in. Bethany Animal Hospital has never changed families since the day it opened, and most of what makes it a different kind of veterinary practice today traces straight back to that.
1959
Two veterinarians from Nebraska buy a clinic on Route 64.
Berni and Russell Schelkopf both grew up in rural Nebraska. Russell earned his Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from Iowa State University in 1958, and the couple then moved to Elburn, Illinois. The following year, 1959, they bought Haxby Veterinary Clinic on Route 64 in Sycamore. That purchase, a young couple taking over an existing practice in a town they had only just moved to, is the beginning of everything that follows on this page.
Bethany Road
This building has been the practice's home since 1979. It is not the first address, but it is the one three generations of the same family have worked out of longest.
1959 to 1979
Twenty years as Schelkopf Veterinary Clinic on Route 64.
For its first two decades the practice operated under the Schelkopf name on Route 64. In 1978, Russell and Berni's son Michael, known around the practice as Mike, earned his own DVM from the University of Illinois. Not long after, he and his veterinary school classmate, Deborah, who would later become his wife, joined the family practice. A second generation was now working alongside the first, on the same clinic Berni and Russell had bought a year after Russell's own graduation.
1979 to 1981
The move to Bethany Road, a new name, and a second brother.
In 1979, Mike and Deborah moved the practice to its current location on Bethany Road and renamed it Bethany Animal Hospital. Two years later, in 1981, Mike's brother Charlie joined as a veterinarian, bringing a third Schelkopf into the practice at once.
In those early Bethany years the practice still treated both companion animals and the area's livestock, and the work was split along fairly clear lines: Deborah focused on companion animal medicine, while Mike and Charlie handled the livestock side that had always been part of veterinary work in this part of DeKalb County. Slowly, as Sycamore grew and the practice grew with it, Bethany became what it is today, a full-service small-animal and exotic-pet hospital, though the building on Bethany Road is the same one the family moved into in 1979.
Now
Three generations in, most of the people are still the same people.
Mike Schelkopf, DVM, is Bethany's current owner, three generations after his parents bought a clinic on Route 64. Around him the practice has grown into a team with 120 years of combined veterinary experience and seven veterinarians on staff, but the clearest proof that Bethany has stayed the kind of place it started as is not a headcount. It is how long the same people tend to stay.
- Dawn Felix
- Practice team
- 60yrs
- Dr. Carlos Dominguez
- Veterinarian
- 26yrs
- Dr. LeAnn Gruber
- Veterinarian
- 25yrs
- Erin Murphy
- Leadership and facility management
- 25yrs
- Jodie
- Rehabilitation therapist and CVT
- 18yrs
The full team, including the leadership, technician, assistant and client service groups behind these five names, is on the team page.
What the record proves
Three accreditations, none of them new.
Bethany is AAHA Accredited, a standard the American Animal Hospital Association holds practices to on their equipment, protocols and record keeping, not just their intentions. It also holds Cat Friendly Practice status at the Silver level from the Feline Veterinary Medical Association, and Carly Stadie and Dr. LeAnn Gruber are both named FVMA members on staff, with Dr. Gruber a Certified Feline Friendly Practitioner. On top of that, Bethany has Fear Free certified professionals on staff, trained specifically to reduce fear, anxiety and stress during a visit.
The practice has also been voted DeKalb County's Best Veterinarian and Animal Hospital, and it is rated 4.7 out of 5 across 627 Google reviews. None of that is a slogan written for this page. It is the same kind of dated, checkable claim as 1959 or 1979, just measured in stars and certificates instead of years.
Come see it yourself
The family is still here. So is the building.
Call the office on (815) 239-6938, or text (815) 991-4556 if it can wait until we are between appointments. New patients are welcome.
2400 Bethany Road, Sycamore, IL 60178