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REGGIE PROTHRO is smiling big-time now. But nine months ago he could barely eat. He cut food into tiny pieces and didn’t eat roast beef, lamb, lettuce, fruit, carrots or a host of other things. When he was screened by Robert Loomis, a USC dental student, Reggie had only two teeth left, and those would soon be extracted.
“I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t go to job interviews,” Prothro says. “I was down and out, and my teeth were falling out.”
The prosthetic pearly whites that now gleam whenever Prothro flashes his 100-kilowatt smile came courtesy of the USC School of Dentistry, which recently opened a dental clinic on the second floor of the Union Rescue Mission in downtown L.A.’s impoverished Skid Row.
“Our goal was to create a unique educational environment where our students can develop community dentistry skills and at the same time provide comprehensive dental care for the homeless men, women and children,” says USC dentist Charles Goldstein, chair of community dentistry and the school’s public health section.
Using the clinic’s six dental operatories, X-ray room and panoramic unit (used to detect growths, tumors and fractures), USC faculty and students have been providing a broad range of dental services to Skid Row’s destitute residents: tooth cleanings, fillings, extractions, root canals, partials, bridges, dentures and dental education. To the children of Skid Row, they’ve been doling out an ounce of prevention and a pound of dental hygiene.
Most of the adult patients need extensive work. “We see a lot of missing teeth and decay,” says Goldstein. “Some of them haven’t seen the dentist for 20 years, and they don’t brush.”
Phillip Head is typical. “I would be eating and a piece of tooth would chip off,” he recalls. “I’d say, ‘Oh well, hope I didn’t swallow it,’ and keep on eating.” Head came to the USC clinic after losing a cap. Eventually all his badly broken and infected upper teeth had to be extracted.
“The people here are good. They give us some pride and dignity. I feel like I’m part of the world again,” says Head, who has since moved on to a job on a fishing boat in the Northwest. As for Prothro, he now works in the clinic and dreams of becoming a dental technician. To that end, he recently enrolled in community college.
The clinic is funded by a mix of charitable, corporate and government grants.
Frree Prress
THE DAVIDS and Chets of American air-waves have been giving way to Geraldos and Andreis in recent years.
And that’s as it should be, communication expert Geoffrey Cowan said in a recent Los Angeles Times article titled “Life, Liberty and the Right to Roll Your Double R’s.” The former director of Voice of America believes that those with Spanish or other non-English surnames have the right to pronounce their names with an accent. “At VOA we changed the rules since we felt that there is no one ‘American’ accent,” Cowan said. The only VOA rule about broadcasters’ accents: they must be easily understandable.
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