What’s More Important Than Free Dental Care for Children? The Circus and Farm Work, 1919

"Circus Day in Alamance, Fodder Pulling in Wilkes, and Tobacco Curing in Pitt,”  from the November, 1919, issue of The Health Bulletin, published by the North Carolina State Board of Health

Dentist reporting for one week from Alamance said, “Finished Hawfield school and moved to Pinetop Friday morning where I was scheduled to be Friday and Saturday. Found school closed and teachers and children gone to Burlington to see circus.”

Certainly more cheerful than a report from there one year ago would have been. Then the schools were closed on account of influenza. But it is not encouraging from a “better teeth” standpoint. However, what excuse could the “Old Boys” at Pinetop have found for going to the circus if the children had remained in school?

From Wilkes the nurse reported on one occasion, “I do not know how many of the schools are stopping a month for ‘fodder pulling’ but I believe a majority of country schools.” Later experience proved her prediction abundantly correct. But we respectfully pass that report on to Dr. Clarence Poe and his corps of Progressive Farmer workers, with the suggestion that they keep up the fight against the foolish practice of fodder pulling by anybody, let alone by the children who ought to be in school. Lay it on, Poe! The darkest hour of course is said to be before the dawn breaks.

From Pitt the dentist reported in July that “Tobacco curing is the order of the day in …. Neighborhood. Worked there two days: first day very little response although one family of seven children, four between 6 and 13, and therefore entitled to treatment, lived just across road from schoolhouse. Father said all were busy in tobacco and unless I moved my outfit across the road and worked at noon none of them could come. All had teeth in deplorable condition. None in this community seem to appreciate the need for such work for the care of their children. What a contrast to the experience in Grifton. There they have a splendid school building, everybody was interested, and Prof. W.G. Coltrane was there to give me plenty of assistance. It does not seem possible that the two places could lie in the same county.”

There you have an unconscious diagnosis and prescription all in one short letter. If every school district in North Carolina had a W.G. Coltrane or a G.R. Wheeler in it as head of the schools, in 10 years the course of North Carolina history would begin to be written in a different vein for the next thousand years.

There is no better place than just here to state again that a majority of men who are really able to take their children to dentists regularly for dental treatment never do it, and it requires the hardiest sort of urging to get these same people to take their children to the free clinics and get the advantage of absolutely free treatment.

Men who would walk a mile to pick up a nickel in the road will suffer a free clinic to be held within a hundred yards of their door, and unless some public worker urges them to take advantage of $30 worth of free work for their children’s teeth (and it will be worth that many thousands to the children later in life), they passively fail to take advantage of the opportunity. This we find to be the prime need for educational work. Our idea is to get the little fellows of six years old into the dental chair, and therefore make a dental patient for some dentist at regular intervals for life.