MY DENTISTRY CAREER CRUSHED

My Dentistry Career

CRUSHED

by the late MARSHALL PATTON

Growing up in a small town, and working every type of job imaginable, makes a guy think there is nothing he cannot do. During high school, I rode horses, worked in service stations, drove trucks, worked in lumber yards, and pipe yards; just about anything that paid a little money, I could and would do it.

My confidence in being up to any task finally hit a snag. I took up the roll of the resident dentist while contesting in rodeos. I do not remember how it started, but my fame spread rapidly. My entire scope of dental care consisted of pulling teeth.

Cowboys were far too busy they thought to give much attention to their teeth. When someone had a toothache or broke a tooth while competing the quick answer was to find Marsh and get him to pull the tooth. These emergencies usually happened on weekends when no dental office was open.

The routine was about the same all the time. A guy would have an infected tooth, or a tooth got broken off by an animal or some other cowboy who had a different opinion from the victim. Of course, pain killers were not available except maybe one hundred proof whiskey. Someone came to get me and told me that I had a patient waiting for me. So, without ceremony, I took a pair of short-handled pliers and persuaded the sufferer to sit down at about the right height. With someone holding his head, I determined where the bad tooth was, and just clamped down and started pulling and jerking. This is much more of a testimony to the cowboy’s high threshold of pain than it is to my ability as a dentist.

Nowadays, doctors are so concerned about bacteria getting to your system that you must take a round of potent pills to ward off such dangers before your heart, brain, or something else gets poisoned. The last time I needed a tooth pulled, my doctor sent me to a specialist. The charge was $800.00. It is a miracle that I did not kill a dozen cowboys.

During the mid-1950s I was working the Phoenix rodeo and in addition to the Bulldogging, I was entered 32 THE CORRIDOR MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2022

in the Wild Horse Race with Billy Weeks and Bob Ferguson. Bob served in the Marines during WWII. His exploits were legendary, and during his service in the Pacific he saved the life of his platoon leader. The young lieutenant was wounded and captured by the Japanese. Bob pulled off a miracle by dragging his lieutenant through mud, sludge, and Japanese soldiers until they reached relative safety. Bob did not know it at the time, but his Lieutenant came from a very wealthy family. The Lieutenant and his family were eternally grateful to Bob and stood by him later in life even when he was mixed up in more than a few clashes with trouble.

Bob was top hand riding bareback horses and bulls. He had wonderful and beautiful blonde wife. She was a racer and a good one. The thing Bob could not do was play poker. Once he had lost all his money and gambled away his wife’s horse. He finally bought the horse back at a premium. However, a little incident left his wife with a bad case of the jitters and she developed a habit of stall walking when Bob became tardy showing up in places he should be.

Well, it was well past mid-morning on Sunday and the Phoenix rodeo began at one o’clock sharp. Bob had not shown up all night and his wife and I were getting pretty antsy about Bob’s whereabouts, albeit for different reasons. Every few minutes Billy Weeks and I held a conference and weighed the chances of Bob showing up on time, and should we try to recruit someone else to take his place on our wild horse team. We soon nixed the idea of a recruit . The wild horse race was profitable money-making event but only with a good three-man team. It was not worth getting killed over. We sent out couriers and scouts to try to locate the biggest stakes poker game going at the time. All inquires came up empty. I did not know what to say to Bob’s wife. The several things I thought of all seemed hollow when I ran them through my mind.

At 12:30, thirty minutes before the rodeo was to start, Billy Weeks and I decided to wait five more minutes

before we withdrew from the wild horse race. Suddenly, Bob came swinging up through the behind the chutes. He had a rolling, athletic gait, even though his blood alcohol content forbade him from driving on any road in the United States. I was glad to see that he was all right but when I looked over at Bob’s wife,she immediately improved her demeanor, so Bob strolled right on up and gave her a kiss.

Once the greetings were over and everything seemed to be getting back in order, Bob told me that he had a killer of a toothache. He wanted me to pull it. Well, only minutes before the rodeo started was no time for dental work. The wild horse race was the final event which was quickly followed by the bareback riding and bull riding. I tried to get him to tough it out until after the rodeo, but he insisted.

I pulled a lot teeth, but it never was an easy task. It was nearly always in the most primitive conditions. Many cowboys chewed tobacco or dipped snuff from the time they were young boys which might have contributed to many of them possessing bad teeth at a early age. No matter what caused it, when someone suffered from an infected tooth, he wanted it out of there and would endure any amount of pain to get rid of it.

I didn’t solicit the dental trade. The business came to me. Invariably, some guy would get a painful toothache on a Saturday or Sunday when there was no chance of getting a dentist. He wanted the tooth pulled and immediately was not soon enough.

When Bob insisted that I pull the tooth immediately, I just said “Let’s get it done.” I needed a pair of short, handled pliers with new grooves in them. Nothing was easy about pulling a tooth in those circumstances. My pliers were among the missing, so someone brought a pair of pliers with extra-long handles on them. The next thing I needed, of was the pick of a good dentist. I did not have a pointed probe to check Bob’s teeth. All his lower teeth were black and decayed. I wanted to be sure to find the right tooth, so I checked them all. I used my hoof-pick. To those of you not acquainted with horses, a hoof-pick is a little hook-like instrument used to clean dirt and manure out of a horse’s feet just before roping or bulldogging. I always carried one of those little picks. I just wiped my hoof-pick off on my pant leg and started touching all of Bob’s teeth. It was evident to all when I hit the bad tooth so I had that part down right. I wanted to make sure I pulled the correct tooth.

I warned Bob that this was going to hurt worse than finding out his wife was cheating on him and he just said, “Get ‘er out.” Bob sat in the trunk of my car, lid up, with one man on each side of him grasping his head and holding him down in the trunk. I knew this was going to be a tough one so I took extra special care to get those long pliers as close to the base of that tooth as I could, by pushing the gums back; unfortunately, I clamped down too hard on those long-eared pliers and felt that tooth crunch into a dozen different pieces right in the socket. I hadn’t taken into consideration the extra leverage those long handles gave me. I could have watched a school bus get hit by a train and not have gone into shock the way I did when that tooth crumbled. Bob did not scream; he just gave me one big shudder and fell back into the trunk. He wore a white shirt that looked dull compared to his complexion. We helped him lean forward and he spat out a few stray pieces. He garbled some words and I quickly understood that there were some fragments he needed for me to remove. Someone found a pair needle-nose pliers and handed them to me. I looked desperately for anyone to take over the job of plucking some of the tooth pieces but there were no takers. At this point I was the most reluctant dentist on earth. I plucked and pulled out all the bits I could but had to leave some terrible looking jagged pieces in place.

Bob worked himself out of the trunk of my car while I was deciding on just what kind of punishment I should inflict upon myself. I told Billy Weeks we could all withdraw him from the bareback riding and the bull riding. He reminded us that we could not win anything by turning our stock out and withdrawing from the events. In fifteen minutes, he was walking straight, and I told Billy he might be all right. Billy told me that I looked pale also and would I be okay? I was fine physically but almost overcome with remorse.

Bob did a great job in the wild horse race and we won another first. I pulled the cinch for him in the bareback riding and he seemed okay to me by then. However, he flew out over his horse’s head and hung on to his head and hung on to his grip one extra jump and that horse drilled his head straight into the ground. He was out cold but alive!

The bull riding was the last event and I tried again to get him to withdraw. He reminded me again that you cannot win anything by withdrawing. I kept cold towels on him except for the few minutes I was away bulldogging. Bob drew a bad bull (there are no easy ones) but he rode magnificently on him.

The next morning, I was leaving for El Reno, Oklahoma, and Bob needed to be back in Oklahoma to tend to some legal matters. His wife was going on to California on some barrel racing business.

I told Bob I would take him any place in Oklahoma he wanted to go. He threw all of his clothes, his bull rope, and bareback rigging in my car and then we left and drove all night.

Bob brushed off my apologies about the botched dentistry business. I thought he would go to sleep, having not gone to bed the night before. However, he stayed awake and talked to me the whole trip.

Since the fiasco of crunching that tooth in Bob’s jaw, I instantly gave up the dentistry. Later, I pulled a few kids’ teeth, ones that were ready to come out anyway, but that was all.

A person would have a better chance catching me at a Yoko Ono concert than standing over someone with a pair of pliers in my hand! n