Santa Fe staple, pediatric dentist retires 57 years later

Since 1952, Cook has enjoyed serving children from across New Mexico

Robin Martin | The New Mexican

9/4/2009 - 8/27/09

When Edward Cook came to Santa Fe as a pediatric dentist in 1952, he was the only such specialist in the state. Now after 57 years, he has retired.

Cook, now 82, was one of 58 students in his class at the Baylor Dental School in Dallas — and one of five still living, he said. He went on to study children's dentistry at Oregon State University.

He came to New Mexico at the invitation of Baylor classmate Robert Henry, whose father had been a dentist in Wagon Mound.

One of Santa Fe's four dentists, Michael Berardinelli had his office at the corner of Palace Avenue and Cienega Street. He told Cook that he would let him have a place to practice, if he would treat children.

"Berardinelli told me, 'Do you mind if I gather some patients to see you?' Soon I had 70 kids lined up, all the way to La Posada," Cook said. He took their names down and eventually treated most of them, some of whom eventually became the great-grandparents of his most recent patients.

In 1953, he married Mary Jean Straw, a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma. Her family had lived in Santa Fe since 1939. Music brought the couple together. He is a good singer and as a music major at college, she had studied keyboard instruments.

The couple moved back to Dallas for several years, but returned to Santa Fe in 1961, where they set up practice in the Willi Spiegelberg house, now the Peyton-Wright Gallery at the corner of Palace Avenue and Paseo de Peralta. They lived in the front of the house and the dental office was in the back. Mary Jean was Edward's first-chair assistant. Cook's first receptionist was Rose Cornet, from Raton.

Cook was on the staff of St. Vincent Hospital, right across the street.

The couple never took a vacation. Their patients came from all over the state, and at all hours.

Cook remembers when a boy
from Las Trampas came in at
2:30 a.m. He had fallen on a basketball court and knocked out some teeth. Cook, still in his pajamas, put the teeth back in with orthodontic brackets and wires.

A 12- or 13-year-old boy from Cimarron, whose parents had made him come in to get his teeth filled, pulled a knife on Cook. The dentist was able to calm him down and perform the work.

He said that he calmed his patients by singing. He had special names for the dental equipment: "Tweety Bird" for the drill, the "Kiss" for the vacuum. Former patients still greet him on the street, asking, "How is Tweety Bird?"

He always took time to greet children when they came into his operatory, and afterward told them that they had been wonderful patients.

"In those days, children were cleaned up and scrubbed up to come to the dentist," he said.

In the 1950s when Cook practiced with Berardinelli, a dental visit cost $20. When he began his own practice, it cost $40. But often he was paid in vegetables. "I remember a lot of squash," he said.

In the 1970s, the Cooks traveled to Gallup every month to treat Navajo children. He said those patients had a great many cavities, because Nehi soda pop was popular on the reservation.

He participated in the first cleft palate repair clinics in New Mexico, which started with some 35 patients a year. By the 1970s, the clinics attracted only three or four people. He attributes this drop to a law passed at that time mandating potable drinking water for all Indian villages.

Today with more emphasis on dental hygiene, better diet, modern materials for fillings, laser drills and fluoride in most drinking water, children's teeth are better than ever.

Cook has sold his practice, now on Otero Street north of Marcy, to Tom Ashbrook, a Belen native who had been practicing in Las Cruces.

Mary Jean and Edward have
two sons. Both live New Mexico. Since 1971, the couple have lived
in a John Meem-designed house
near Sun Mountain. But Edward is often downtown, strolling, lunching at The Shed and running into former patients.

"I don't think I ever met a child I didn't like," he said.