From plastic surgeon to snowplow driver: Meet Iowa City’s John Canady

It started as a joke between friends.

After decades in the operating room performing very fine facial surgeries on children born with facial deformities, and later in the boardroom as a medical executive, Dr. John Canady was readying to retire.

He and a friend, Steve Rauch, discussed what Canady would do in retirement.

Rauch, a senior highway technician for the Iowa Department of Transportation based in Coralville, quipped: “Come push snow with me.”

“Then (retirement) came (in 2021) and I brought it up again, and he actually took me up on it,” Rauch recalled. “I was surprised, but I wasn’t surprised, because I had known John for at least 10 years or more. It was funny at first, but I knew he could do it.”

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Canady grew up in Jefferson, a rural community about 40 miles west of Ames. He worked on farms, drove trucks, had a commercial driver's license in high school and enjoyed playing with heavy machinery like loaders and dump trucks.

After he retired, the former plastic surgeon and medical executive began watching hours upon hours of truck driving videos and reading driver’s manuals. After about four weeks, he obtained a commercial driver’s license after passing a written test to get a learner's permit, driving with Rauch after work to get used to the plow truck and completing a driving test in Cedar Rapids.

The Iowa City resident began pushing snow that winter, clearing exit ramps north and south between Riverside and Swisher on Interstate 380.

“It's a lot of fun to have something that powerful to just be driving around,” Canady said. “When I was little, we played in the sandbox with our trucks. And this is sort of like that, except on a much grander scale. … … I really can't overstate how much fun it was just using that big equipment to move heavy, big things around.”

And he’s not the first retired doctor to get behind the wheel of an Iowa DOT plow.

“We have quite a few retirees driving plows — farmers, retired law enforcement, a retired university IT worker — we get a variety of people,” Rauch said. “We had a retired cancer doctor driving plows 10 to 12 years ago.”

Getting behind the wheel of a huge orange truck for the first time can be intimidating, Canady said. And just like surgery, complicated machines take a great deal of skill to operate effectively.

Throw in skid loaders, mini excavators and other pieces of equipment, and plow drivers need to be highly skilled and well-trained to keep both themselves and others safe on Iowa’s highways, Canady said.

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Canady retired as vice president of medical affairs for Johnson & Johnson companies. Previously, he was a professor of plastic surgery at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, where he was involved with clinical care of patients, research and teaching of medical students, residents and fellows.

He still travels to Guatemala to perform free cleft lip and palate surgery through Iowa MOST, a project of Iowa City Noon Rotary Club. The team of doctors, dentists, nurses, medical students, Rotarians and other volunteers help children and adults living in Guatemala who need facial, ear, nose and throat and cataract surgeries.

“I spent my entire practice … in an academic medical center,” he said. “And the reason I did that was because I really enjoyed learning. I enjoy learning about new things. I enjoy new kinds of challenges.”

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That, he said, is why he decided to become a plow driver.

“There was a new kind of skill tests for that,” he said. “You can say the same thing about surgery, right? There's a body of knowledge that you've kind of got to master mentally, and then there's physical skills you've got to master in order to be decent at what you’re doing.”

Fortunately, he had Rauch and others at the Iowa DOT to help him learn the systems of the truck and train him on his routes.

“I don’t know that I could say I trained him. He just absorbed knowledge,” Rauch said.

Canady said his experience as a plastic surgeon and snowplow driver also share similarities in helping people, whether that be correcting facial deformities or clearing roads to make sure people can get home or to work, school, the hospital or the store.

He said he found driving a plow on a snowy road both exhilarating and terrifying at times.

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He said he had a few close calls while driving in near-whiteout conditions. He recalled a specific snowstorm in 2022 where visibility was almost zero, and plows were unable to clear roads due to the heavy snowfall.

“I honestly couldn't see. I mean, it's almost hard to describe,” Canady said. “The lights on the plow illuminated the snow that was coming down so hard. It kind of looked like that scene in ‘Star Wars’” where the Millennium Falcon’s transition to hyperspace causes the stars to look like they are warping to the point where they become lines of light.

“But mostly you just can't see the side of the road,” he said.

Canady plowed for two consecutive winters in 2021 and 2022. He took a break to focus on business consulting, but is considering driving a snowplow again this winter.

The Iowa DOT is responsible for snow and ice removal on more than 24,500 miles of the state’s highways.

A typical Iowa winter will include about 32 inches of snow, several freezing rain events, below zero temperatures and blowing and drifting snow, according to the department — conditions faced head-on by about 1,120 snowplow operators, mechanics and supervisors at 101 maintenance garages across the state.

Canady called Iowa DOT snowplow drivers hardworking, funny and smart individuals who deserve more recognition for their difficult job.

“All the lane markings are obscure. And so it's really hard to know where you are on the road,” he said. “Plus, you got semis and people trying to pass. You're trying to keep the plow angled right at the right height, and you've got a whole bunch of readouts to monitor in terms of how much salt and sand you're putting down. So it's actually, at the end of the day, it's a pretty complex job.”

One, Canady said, provides “a lot of insight into human nature.”

“When you're out there in the middle of a blizzard, when you really ought to think about slowing down, people would get right up behind me and be flashing their lights and honking their horn,” he said. “They sweep out to pass me, flip me off. And then, predictably — because karma never really goes away, right? — you go down about a half mile and they're sitting in the ditch, because they just haven't figured out that road is slick and you just can't go 70 miles an hour.”

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