Every time the Pineau family went out to eat in Baltimore, there was a good chance someone would come up and say, “Dr. P! It’s good to see you!”

Arthur Leonard “Lenny” Pineau Jr., the owner of Aardmore Veterinary Hospital in Waverly, didn’t mind. Actually, these were the kinds of interactions savored by a cheery, extroverted guy like him. Besides, it was bound to happen after working at the clinic for a half-century and caring for more than 5,000 people’s pets.

The 76-year-old never wanted to retire from Aardmore, the mom-and-pop animal hospital that features a mural of animals on the side of the building. Three dogs and a cat stroll along a geometric background colored blue, purple, pink and orange. At the end of the line, another cat cranes its neck to peer back at the silhouettes following her.

Saturday, Oct. 25 was just like any other work day for Pineau, who saw a few clients before heading home to the family farm in Baltimore County. He started feeling faint and eventually headed to the hospital, where he died suddenly of a suspected pulmonary embolism with his wife by his side.

Pineau and Aardmore were nearly synonymous, and, in his absence, the hospital will now close by the end of the year.

“He just loved the clients, loved the animals, loved being Dr. P,” said his wife, Patricia “Pat” Bradley Pineau, also a veterinarian who ran Aardmore with her husband until she retired last year. She’s now helping transfer patient records and seeing a handful of clients as the clinic prepares to shut its doors.

“I talk to the clients who say, ‘We can’t find anybody like him,’” she said. “It’s going to be hard for them to change. We’ve been here so long.”

But ‘Dr. P.’ was just one of Pineau’s many titles, which also included arcade runner, clothing store owner, horse breeder and rider, brother, husband, father, grandfather (“GP” to the grandkids), water sport enthusiast, amateur artist and unofficial master of mischief, family said.

“He really built a life that he loved,” said his youngest daughter, Katie Pineau. “He just really chased the things that he was passionate about.”

That life began in Baltimore on March 15, 1949. He was the younger of two children born to Arthur “Art” and Wanda Pineau, arriving just 15 months after his sister Linda. He grew up mostly in Hamilton and spent summers boating and waterskiing on Lake Winnisquam in New Hampshire with extended family.

Though Lenny Pineau was close with both of his parents, he and his father shared a special bond and love of hijinks that shaped the course of his life. His father would often take him to horse races as a child. One of young Lenny’s most formative memories was the time his father was sick but didn’t want to miss the chance to place a bet at Pimlico. So he sent his teenage son over with a wad of cash and a mission, said Lenny’s son-in-law Scott Wilson.

Around the same time, Art Pineau decided to purchase Funcade Casino on the Ocean City boardwalk, and he took his son with him to live there in the summers. Lenny Pineau worked the closing shift, manning the cashier’s desk and handing out prizes. Later, the younger Pineau opened a clothing store in the beach town with his close friends, family said.

“He was a middle-class kid, and so to him, success in business — and in small business in particular — was so much the American dream,” Wilson said. “He was just very proud of what he had been able to achieve personally through hard work.”

Lenny Pineau’s parents enrolled him at the McDonogh School in the eighth grade, where he played a host of sports, including football, basketball, lacrosse and horseback riding. He so cherished his time at McDonogh that he organized reunions for the Class of 1967 for nearly 40 years.

After high school, Pineau went off to study veterinary science at Texas A&M University. As he told it, Pineau skipped the core curriculum and only took the pre-veterinary courses, against the counsel of his adviser. After two years at the school, and without an undergraduate degree, he applied to the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Pineau had a meeting with the dean of the program and made a case for admission, he told family — and his famous charm was likely part of the reason he was able to enroll in 1969.

During his senior year, while working at a local veterinary clinic on Christmas Day, he met his eventual wife, Patricia Bradley. She had just moved to the United States after finishing a veterinary program in England, and she was immediately drawn to his sense of humor and irreverence, she said. Lenny Pineau would later tell his kids that the moment he laid eyes on her, he leaned over to his friends and said, “That’s the one I’m going to marry.”

They would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in May.

Lenny Pineau had spent weekends at Aardmore in high school, and he began working at there again after obtaining his veterinary degree. Patricia Bradley Pineau joined the practice in 1975, and shortly after their marriage, the couple took over the hospital.

Tabitha Stewart, who worked at Aardmore from 1994 to 2009, described Lenny Pineau as a skilled, friendly doctor who always had the animals’ best interests in mind.

“He was very patient, and he was very good at explaining stuff,” Stewart said. “If he found something really cool during a surgery, he would say, ‘Come look at this!’ and he would explain to us what it is. He was a good teacher.”

He was the one to pitch a staff outing and offer to cover the first round of drinks, Stewart said. Every year, the Pineaus hosted an employee holiday party at their beloved Three Pines Farm in Glyndon.

The hospital staff was a second family to the Pineaus, but their immediate family always came first. In 1979, the couple welcomed their first child, Jennifer, and Paul followed three years later. Thirteen years after that, Katie completed the family.

Katie Pineau has a host of treasured family memories through the years — watching her father perform magic tricks as a kid; going wakeboarding or snowboarding on vacation; cheering on the Ravens together at M&T Bank Stadium; laughing as Lenny swung his wife around on the dance floor at weddings. He always wore a bow tie to those kinds of events, but, she said, “I swear he only wore the bow tie so he could untie it.” He thought it looked cooler around his neck.

He also kept a close relationship with his sister Linda and her husband, Bob Marano, who joined the Pineaus for the annual white elephant gift exchange at Christmas and monthly dinners.

When his children started having children, Lenny Pineau stepped into the ultimate role of GP, often taking his three grandsons swimming, inviting them to feed the horses and encouraging them to push boundaries (all in good fun).

“He was a big kid,” Marano said.

Pineau’s sudden death has left a gaping hole in his family, but they find comfort in knowing he left the world exactly as he wanted — with all of his faculties, in good health, caring for animals and keeping up the farm until the day he died.

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