"Dentistry in the Boondoggles"

Dr. Clayton A. Pollard at work on the Yukon River, 1920s.

DENTISTRY IN THE BOONDOGGLES

NOVEMBER 2009

In about 1940, Archie McLane of Kasilof had a visitor who traveled from Outside and developed a bad toothache. Because of the remoteness of the location—no roads yet existed between the western Kenai Peninsula and Anchorage or Seward—the visitor believed that he would simply have to suffer until he reached home again.

“As far as he was concerned, it was the boondoggles of nothing, you know,” said McLane’s daughter, Joan Lahndt. “My dad said, ‘No problem. We’ll go up here to the dentist.’” McLane was referring to Dr. Clayton A. Pollard, who was spending summers with his family on a small fox ranch in Kasilof while operating a dental practice in Anchorage the rest of the year.

“So he took him to Doc, and he was out shoeing a horse,” said Lahndt. “Doc said to go in and he would be right there. Lucy (Pollard’s wife) took over and made the guest ready for the chair. Then Doc came and took care of him. The guy was pretty impressed.”

Such was the life for the semi-retired dentist who had moved to Anchorage in 1920 to open a dental practice. In 1935, he and Lucy and their two young sons, George and Clayton, began living each summer in a small, wood-framed cabin on property owned by Perry Cole. When Cole and his family moved away permanently in 1946, the Pollards bought the whole place, and Doc Pollard closed down his Anchorage practice for good.

From the time he first arrived in Kasilof, however, he realized that a full retirement was out of the question.

“He wanted to retire,” said George, who still lives in the family home next to what has become known as Pollard Lake. “He came down here to retire—to become a farmer. He always loved farming…. Well, somebody heard there was a dentist here. They had a toothache. They went to him. And so he more or less felt obligated to help these people who needed dental work because at that time it was quite an expedition to go to Anchorage.”

The only other dental choice on the peninsula was Dr. Russell Wagner, who began his practice in Seward in the mid-1930s and worked into the mid-1960s. In the mid-1950s, he had contracted polio and was forced to work only part time.

Long-time Soldotna resident Al Hershberger, who worked for the Alaska Road Commission, remembers driving a huge Army 6x6 truck on the rough new Sterling Highway to make connections with Dr. Wagner when he broke a tooth in 1948. All the way to Seward and all the way home, he met no other vehicle on the road.

In fact, finding a dentist could be such an ordeal for peninsula residents that former state legislator Clem Tillion of Halibut Cove used to tell a joke about the experience—at Doc Pollard’s expense.

According to the joke, a man in Homer needed dental work and was in great pain, so he hiked up the beach along Cook Inlet, fording all the streams until he reached the Kasilof River. He was able to catch a ride across the river at the mouth, and he then walked the seven-mile road that ended at Pollard’s front door. Then he sank thankfully into Pollard’s collapsible dental chair, only to have Doc pull the wrong tooth.

Such arduous trips were real enough, but screw-ups were not. Doc Pollard was actually a competent dentist who helped sore-mouthed folks all over the state. According to Legends & Legacies: Anchorage 1910-1935, when he practiced in Anchorage, Pollard obtained a government contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and occasionally had a pilot fly him into the Interior, where he would attend to the dental needs of the Natives.

Perhaps the only photo of Pollard in dental action comes from one of these trips. In the photo, he is wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a dress shirt and a tie as he stands on board a boat on the Yukon River. Next to him are his box of dental instruments and his old S.S. White foot-pedal drill. Seated in front of him is his patient, wearing a white bib spread across his chest, his arms folded across his abdomen, waiting.

Born in Missouri in 1887, Pollard moved with his family (including six brothers) in a covered wagon to Texas, where he spent most of his youth. Eventually, he moved on to Colorado, where he entered dental college in 1910. He later began his dental practice in Colorado—until the advent of World War I, in which he became a first lieutenant in the Dental Corps.

After the war, he was married to his first wife in 1919. Only a month after their wedding, however, she contracted pneumonia and died.

In the early 1920s, he met Lucy May Mattson, a Minnesota-born missionary at the Baptist Orphanage on Woody Island near Kodiak. He had come to Woody Island to work on the teeth of the orphans, and he fell in love with Mattson. They were married in 1923.

At the ranch, wrote George in Once Upon the Kenai, Lucy helped Doc’s dental business in two important ways: “sterilizing his dental instruments and apologizing to his patients when he came in from the barn and smelled like it.”

Among his patients in Kasilof were the McLanes. “We went to him when we were just really little kids,” said Lahndt. “We knew we were privileged to have a dentist right here. And we went to him regularly, if nothing else to have him clean our teeth.”

During his semi-retirement, Doc Pollard relaxes with his bible.

Also Doc’s patients were his sons. “It isn’t my most pleasant memory,” said George. “When we were little kids, you know, we loved candy, like a lot of kids. And of course we got the cavities, too. So he’d get us up there in the chair and get out the drill. And sometimes he’d give us a shot of Novocain first. Sometimes he wouldn’t. And we’d wince, and he’d say, ‘That’ll teach you to eat chocolate.’”

Despite his intention to retire, Pollard accepted anyone needing help, and he even traveled on occasion to Homer and Seldovia whenever a demand for his services arose.

The front door of the Pollard place—the home was built originally for Perry Cole in 1928 by Louis Nissen and Ole Frostad—forms a portion of an arctic entry, which leads directly into the kitchen. Patients who made the journey to the Pollard ranch were led through a portion of the kitchen into the front room, with its windows facing the driveway and the lake.

There, Lucy would make them comfortable while they waited for Doc to stroll inside, wash up and change into his dental smock before beginning the examination or procedure. Before electricity was available, Lucy would use a stovetop autoclave to sterilize the instruments, and Doc would use one of his feet to pump the foot pedal that turned the flywheel and powered the drill. “Not a lot of rpm’s generated that way,” said George.

Of course, as has always been the case with dentists, not all patients walk away happy—even after they have received the treatment they needed. One such patient was long-time Soldotna resident Marge Mullen, who, by her own account, had had minimal dental care as a child because she was the oldest of six kids growing up in the Depression.

So Mullen came to Doc Pollard with an incomplete set of upper teeth and a sore mouth. When she arrived, she spotted him pushing a wheelbarrow out in the yard by the barn. After examining her a few minutes later, Doc removed all of her remaining uppers in one sitting.

Mullen remembers Pollard as a quiet man who said little as he went about his work. And she also remembered the headlamp he wore to illuminate his workspace, and a white enamel bucket into which she had to spit, the only other method of removing blood, saliva and particulate from the mouth being suction via a large syringe.

“And, oh my God, I came home and I felt so bad,” she recalled. The pain of the extractions lingered for many days.

Pollard later made (or had someone make) a denture to replace her upper teeth. And, in the end, despite the discomfort, Mullen was thankful: “It was great to have that service here, even out of his home. That’s the way it had to be at that time, in the history of Kasilof.”