LUCKY LAWHORN

me about three-weeks salary for a small filling, so I figured I’d try to go to dental school,” he says.

He was accepted as part of the very first class at the University of Texas School of Dentistry in Houston. Eventually, he passed organic chemistry.

“Of course, I cheated,” he says.

One of his study partners had copies of three of the old professor’s previous tests. Lawhorn memorized them, and he got lucky. The test he took was one he had memorized.

He graduated from dental school in 1959 and set up office in Oak Cliff, first in Westmoreland Heights and then on Illinois near Hampton, where he still works three days a week. That’s right. Lawhorn is 89, and he still practices dentistry.

In the heyday, there were partners and hygienists and a receptionist. Now it’s just the two of them — Anna runs the business, and Bill checks the teeth.

At the height of his career, Lawhorn was an Oak Cliff civic leader, volunteering a few days a month to work on the teeth of underprivileged children. He served as president of the Oak Cliff Lions Club in 1985; he was also a Master Mason and a Shriner.

He and Anna reared three children in Oak Cliff and traveled the world, visiting the Great Pyramid at Giza and the Great Wall of China among many other destinations, places he could hardly imagine when he was growing up during the Great Depression, sacking groceries at the A&P.

He still remembers his dad shedding tears as he put him on the train to Fort Sam Houston in 1943. But Lawhorn was lucky. He was never shot at and never saw combat.

“I’ve had triple bypass and every kind of operation. All the doctors at Methodist know me,” he says. “They say, ‘Oh my gosh, here comes Lawhorn. I wonder what we’re going to have to cut out now.’”

If he’s lucky, he’ll make it to 100 or so.