If there was a single, most prominent, dread about life in the 1950's for a youngster, it had to be the fear of going to the dentist. It may have been merely because I always had cavities, but a dental appointment was counterbalanced only by the relief of getting rid of a toothache, which could be torture in itself.
When I developed a cavity, I tried to keep it a secret for as long as possible, blowing cool air across the spot, avoiding sugary or salty snacks that would aggravate it, and this was probably counterproductive, because it just got worse until I was screaming with pain.
Then Al and my mom had to make a dental appointment.
Believe me, a visit to the dentist in that day was nothing like it is today, and I am understating it considerably! For starters, we didn't go to the dentist to get our teeth cleaned and have a friendly visit. No one even thought of making an appointment until the screaming got so intense that it was causing disruption of everyone's life.
The dentist I went to was in the same building that Al worked in as an accountant. Instead of going to school, I would ride to La Crosse with them and usually have the appointment right away.
Al would leave me in the care of the dentist and his nurse, having shown me where his office was so I could check in with him when I was finished.
The beginning of the appointment was much as it is today, except that the room was dark and clammy, a chair attached to the floor in the middle of a tiny room. The initial fooling around wasn't so bad, except that I had a toothache and was quivering in abject fear. The dentist would pry my mouth open and stick mirrors, wads of cotton, and his fingers in. Then he would have the nurse hand him tools from a little tray which they tried to keep out of my sight.
"Just looking around," he would say, calmly, as he probed around my teeth with what looked like a nut pick. He would jab it here, tap it there, and then push it right into the hole in my tooth, causing me to jerk my head and bite his hand.
"A little tender, right there!" He would tell the nurse.
I might be starting to cry at this time.
The nurse would comfort me and hold my hand, while the dentist produced, from behind his back, the biggest shot needle I had ever imagined. It looked like a caulking gun. He quickly inserted it into my mouth, saying something like, "this will just sting a little bit."
As he pushed the needle right into my gum about six inches, I tightened my grip on the arm of the dental chair and on the hand of the nurse. The pain was horrific and tears flowed freely from my eyes. After an eternity, he would remove the needle, but he might stick it into another spot.
The profession had not yet advanced to the stage where the dentist, like my current one, dabs a little novocaine on the spot he is going to use and lets it numb up a bit so you hardly feel it.
You waited a few minutes while he went away and did something else. The nurse would ask some lame questions about school to try and take your mind off what was still coming, the drills.
In that day, the dentist did not have at his disposal the technology that we now have. His drill was like a dremel tool but it did not have a nice little high-speed electric motor contained in it. It was attached to a big complicated mechanism that was attached to the floor near the chair. A collapsible arm was jointed at two or three places and little cables turned around pulleys on each length.
He could extend it out and get the dremel tool near your mouth, but all these sections had cables on pulleys that were turned by an electric motor near the floor. It made a lot of noise and you lay there and watched the cables turning on the pulleys while he ground away at the cavity.
I don't think they had the science of injecting the anesthetic in the proper place near an important nerve down very well, because although your mouth was numb, you still felt the piercing pain when he got near the nerve. Al could probably hear me all the way in his office.
The first drilling was at a higher speed and wasn't so bad. Then came the final burr. The speed was reduced so that it vibrated your whole head. It produced waves of traumatizing fear and pain. All the while I was gripping the nurse's hand and crying.
He would remove the drill, squirt some water in and have you spit it out. Then he would dig around in there with the nut pick. Just when you were accepting ecstatic relief that it was over, he would frown and start the jack-hammer drill up again.
Finally, when they packed in the filling, they cleaned me up and the nurse dried my eyes with a rag.
"There! That wasn't so bad, was it?" She would say.
Feeling like a dead man walking who had just been pardoned, I now made my way over to Al Botcher's office where he would let me sit at a little desk and play with his adding machine. It was a big clunky thing that had a roll of paper in the rear. When you tapped the number keys and pushed an elongated lever, it would go "calumph, calumph!" and print the numbers on the paper. You could keep printing numbers. "Calumph, calumph!"
"Calumph, calumph!"
As many as you wanted. Then when you pushed the plus key, it would go "calumph, abooga, calumph!" The sum of the numbers would be printed. It was really cool! He would let me use up as much of the little roll of paper as I wanted.
When I got bored, Al would give me a dollar and let me hang out across the street at the Bodega. The Bodega was a La Crosse institution. It was famous for roasting peanuts and grinding coffee and half the place was devoted to these machines that did those two things. They also sold cigars and pipe tobacco.
Around the side, in an attached room, there was a deli, where you could get a slice of roast beef, or chicken, or any number of things as well as a scoop of mashed potatoes and another side vegetable such as cooked peas or corn. I would have to wait until later in the day to eat, after my mouth thawed out from the dental appointment.
They also sold comic books. For a nickel or a dime you could get a Superman or Batman comic book. There were also others, like Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, and the early Disney characters. I loved comic books and I truly believe that they taught me how to read. I was a good reader in school and I think it was because I read words like, "I've got you now, Batman. I will annhiliate you!" I amassed quite a collection of comic books, enough to fill a cardboard box.
One time I got to go to a movie after my appointment. The Rivoli theater was on the back side of the block that Al's building, The Hoeschler Building, was on. I went and saw The Blob and it blew me away! It started with the most astonishing concept, a rocket had returned from a mission and stuck right into the harbor of a city. Nose first, too! That wasn't very likely, but I had never seen such things.
There it sat with its fins sticking up and smoke emanating from the rear. A fisherman rows out to it and goes in the hatch and finds everyone dead from the impact, but there is a pretty egg which survived. He takes it. Of course the egg is going to hatch and turn into the Blob which terrorizes the whole earth, but I can't even remember how it ended.
It was the scene of the rocket that moved me so. I became instantly obsessed with rockets and space from then on. I started looking things up about space in the encyclopedias at school and soon knew a lot about the solar system, having memorized the diameters, periods of rotation, gravity, distances from the sun, and length of year for all the planets.
The teacher asked us one afternoon if we knew about how long it took the moon to go around the earth. I answered, "twenty-nine days, twelve hours, forty-four minutes, and two and eight tenths of a second." I had actually read that somewhere.
I devoured this stuff and my teachers were very pleased at my new interest. The huge pine tree in the back of the playground had now become a rocket and I explored the solar system in it with my friends.
I had a new passion. And it all started with the excruciating visits to the dentist. And "The Blob".
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