“I have my share of denture or teeth extraction stories, but will spare you all except one. When I was around 7 and before seat belts were even thought about, I liked to stand up constantly behind Mom and Dad’s seat and bombard them with questions. Back in those days predators on children were not thought about, so they would drag us everywhere. We would sit in the car under a shade tree. It usually gave me just enough time to get bored and fill my mind with endless questions about any and everything. Mom had just had a tooth extraction, and she returned to the car with a pained expression and her mouth packed full of gauze. The visual was real scary! I proceeded to start throwing questions her way about why she looked like that. With that wad of gauze affecting her speech she tried to mumble, “Quit, I’ll spit my packing out.” I leaned closer into her face and exclaimed loudly “He bit your punkin off?” She got so tickled she lost gauze and everything. Mom told that for years, as Appalachian women tend to do about the antics of their children. Appalachians just love stories.”
—PinnacleCreek -June 2021
I love the comment PinnacleCreek left back in 2021. Such a cute story about her mother. I can see why the tale was told often in her family.
It reminds me of two stories from Pap.
The first he told if my cousin Gail was nearby. She’s about the same age as my older brother Steve. When they were very young Pap had them in town while either Granny or his mother was in the store. I can’t remember for sure who was along on the trip, but they’d left Pap in the car to babysit Steve and Gail.
Gail wasn’t happy about something and started crying. Pap couldn’t do nothing to console her and she got louder and louder. Finally a policeman heard her and came to see what was the matter. Pap told him your guess is as good as mine if you can stop her from screaming go right ahead 🙂 Every time Pap shared the story his eyes would twinkle as he accused Gail of almost getting him arrested.
The other story was about one of Pap’s friends.
The man went to Asheville to have his teeth pulled and be fitted with dentures. On his way home he had a flat tire. As he was bent over changing the tire someone came up behind him and pecked him on the shoulder. When he looked up a gentleman asked if he knew how to get to the apple orchard.
As you can imagine having all your teeth pulled can cause quite a bit of bleeding, not wanting to spit blood by the man’s feet, Pap’s friend just shook his head no.
The gentleman went back to his car and Pap’s friend got back to fixing the flat.
A few minutes later the gentleman came back and pecked him on the shoulder again asking directions to a different location. Pap’s friend couldn’t hold it in any longer and the blood spilled down both sides of his mouth. The gentlemen started backpedaling and ran for his car.
Pap’s friend told him “Why Jerry he thought I was one of those vampeers. Made me mad as fire I wore my only white shirt and kept it perfectly clean until that man came around asking questions.”
Hope the stories shared today made you smile 🙂
Last night’s video: Visiting an Old Farm Store in the Mountains of Appalachia – Wonderful History!
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Thank you Tipper for printing the denture stories. My family has some cute ones too. My dad was getting his front upper teeth capped. He went to an oral surgeon. Somehow, Daddy’s nose got in the way and the dentist took his fingers and moved daddy’s nose. We laughed and laughed about it. The end product, his capped front teeth, was absolutely beautiful. Yes, I have swallowed a baby tooth and I have swallowed a filling. My mother checked my stool– nothing. She called the dentist and he told her not to worry they would dissolve. Who knows what happened to them.
Take care,
Kathy Patterson
o my Tipper I got so tickle I laugh and laugh. I had to read that one to my husband. Loved it.
In a family of 9 kids and 2 parents, money was a very scarce commodity. None of us had good dental care because we couldn’t afford it. When I was still in grade school, I experienced a couple of abscessed baby tooth molars. They had to come out. I remember the old dentist, Doc Bell, who took them out. I maintain to this day that he was trained in an era before novocaine or any pain killer was used. I doubt that he could have administered any if he had it. He retired while I was still in school only to be followed by another dentist who didn’t believe in pain medication. I had many fillings in permanent teeth without novocaine. After I had finished college, my wisdom teeth starting giving me a lot of pain. I found a young dentist who would hardly examine your teeth without first giving a shot or two of novocaine. H A L L E L U J A H !!!! Thank you, Dr. Renner. He went on to rework all the fillings I had from earlier plus a couple or three crowns. As I recall he pulled 2 of my wisdom teeth and referred me to an oral surgeon to have the other 2 removed. I still have 28 of my permanent teeth, though with crowns on all the molars. I see the dentist twice a year and have experienced no pain from those trips in the last 50 years, and I’ve seen different dentists in FL, Sugar Land, TX, and here in Temple. Those old timers who had to deal with dentists who didn’t have painless dentistry skills were an amazing breed.
Tipper, I was surprised to learn the other day that you don’t use and have never heard ‘raft’ used to mean a lot of something. I use it often. I don’t know when it came into usage to mean that, but my guess it that it came from rafting large amounts of logs downriver. Maybe someone else knows. All’s I know if I’ve used it a raft of times in my 8+ decades.
I heard my mama refer to a large family as “having a raft of young’ins”! Had not thought of that in years.
Thanks for dredging up memories from long ago.
Thank you for making me laugh today, Tipper! I have a story about my granddaddy and the day he got his teeth pulled. It was my mama’s daddy, and I was very young, so I stayed with my grandmama while my mama took him. I don’t remember exactly where it was, but it was about 2 hours from where they lived, one of the places where they pulled them, and you got your dentures the same day. Well, the story goes they were on their way home and all of sudden my granddaddy wants to stop at a country store that he was familiar with. Mama asked him what he needed, and she would go in and get it. He told her he wanted a bag of peanuts. She said “daddy, there is no way in the world you can eat them in the shape your mouth is in.” Well, he said he’d be alright, so she bought them and the rest of the way home, he ate them, and I won’t go into the details, but it was a sight to behold my mama said. When they got back to the house, daddy had already picked me up, so I didn’t see it but when grandmama saw him, she screamed!! It wasn’t funny at the time, but they sure laughed about it later on through the years.
My Grandpa was tired one night and decided to just lay his teeth on a bedside table instead of putting them in a glass of water as he usually did. He woke up the next morning and his uppers were nowhere to be found. He looked under the bed, and all over…no teeth. He heard his old dog, Truman, on the porch chopping on something. Yep, it was his uppers, and Truman was having a fine old time. Pa washed them good, and they were none the worse for the chewing. He kept them in water after that.
Our dental stories from our youth were all pretty terrible. We could only afford the $1.00 dentist and he was a killer. His numbing never worked fast enough to avoid major pain. He pulled my absessed baby molar before it was numb. Amazingly, Daddy scheduled me to come back for the only filling I got during my childhood. It was excruciating and the sound of it was awful. It took Daddy and the dentist to prize my mouth open. I think that may be why I am troubled with TMJ. My brothers all have stories about this guy.
As an adult, I have had wonderful dentists. One of them felt like a friend–saw him over 20 years and was so sad to have to get someone else. I have a good one now but we aren’t friends.
I remember when Uncle Wayne decided to get himself some new teeth. I don’t think Asheville had a same day denture service at that time. He had heard about a place in Florence, South Carolina that did it. He drove all the way to Florence, had his old teeth pulled, had a new plate put in and drove back to Lauada all in the same day. That’s about 600 miles nowdays! That was before interstate highways and 4 lane roads. Half of that distance was with the aftereffects of Novocain.
He was to keep his dentures in for a week or so (I’m not sure, it could have been longer) only taking them out to clean them. The idea was that his gums would grow to fit his new teeth. He followed the instructions to the letter. After the period of time had passed he began to become more and more dissatisfied with his one size fits all smile.
I spent many a night with Uncle Wayne, Aunt Merrill and the boys. I won’t go into detail now about the entirety of the days but after supper here is the routine. The boys are arguing over which channel to watch on TV (they got 2 channels and a 3rd one if the weather was right.) Aunt Merrill is in the kitchen cleaning up after supper. Uncle Wayne is sitting over by the heater whittling, filing, sanding or sawing on his teeth.
Uncle Wayne was a carpenter by trade. You’d think he ought to be able to fix a set of dentures!
Bless your heart, Tipper! I did get a smile on my face when I read about Pap babysitting Gail and I threw my head back laughing out loud when I read the story Pap told about one of his friend’s ordeal coming from just having all his teeth pulled.
My husband and I would have stopped at Debbie’s place for sure if we had passed through that town, as we both loved to look at old antiques and he loved the old hardware stores. Plus, you can’t beat their devotion to customer service. Us old timers remember it and treasure it.
Not only smile, Tipper, a full belly laugh! Thank you for the stories.
Humorous stories of teeth extractions. Thank you for sharing.
Really good humor to start the day with! Thanks so much.
I was in the dental field for a number of years and have a few interesting stories. One story that I still shake my head over is when we had a patient schedule an appointment to have a filling replaced. After the patient was seated, they handed us the amalgam filling they had lost. They said they had gone to a locally favorite Mexican restaurant and while eating had lost the filling. We checked each tooth, all the patient’s filling’s were there and in perfect shape. Yes, it was an amalgam filling and yes, I never went to that restaurant again.
Those stories sure made me smile. Funny stories abound in Appalachia, and sometimes the same ones are told over and over through the years. Pap’s run in with that policeman sure gave him something to tease Gail about for many years. After one strange incident, Mom and Dad were forced to quit letting us sit in the car while they attended to appointments. Dad had a cool Mercury Convertible back in the early 1950’s, and he had bought the impractical car against my practical Mom’s better judgment. We kids were seated in the backseat of the car under our usual shade tree while they shopped at the Piggly Wiggly one Saturday morning. That sharp car drew a young man’s attention, and he was just plumb fascinated by the car. He then hopped in and messed with the gear shift and any available buttons while smiling back at us in awe. Finally, when he had fiddled with just about everything he got out and went on his way. At that young age, I saw nothing unusual in this. The only thing I feared at that age was the ghosts my cousin Bertha kept telling me about. When Dad came back to the car, we were full of wild stories about the man who was trying out his car. Even my toddler sister was explaining the wild tale in her toddler gibberish. Dad never told that story to anyone as far as I can remember. Back then folks just did not worry about kids like they do nowadays.
Enjoyed these stories! Can you imagine how God must have a continuous smile? Since Adam and Eve, He has witnessed these kinds of anecdotes in every human’s life a thousand times over. If only we would remember when we are in a trying moment, that someday we will look back and laugh. Maybe if we would see the humor in the moment as it’s happening, everyone’s cortisol levels wouldn’t be so high! Thank you for a cute post!
Donna. : )
Donna, I think God has a sense of humor, after all he created us humans. You know he has to laugh at some of the things we do. My cousin taught first grade for many years and I have often heard her say parents would kill their children if they knew some of the stories their children had told her about their parents.
I’m still laughing at all three of these stories, but especially that last one. I’m trying to picture in my mind the look on the guys face that was asking pap’s friend for directions.
The Bible talks about laughter working like a medicine and does us so much good, so thank you Miss Tipper for my three large doses of medicine today as this brightened my day and has helped take my mind off of some of the burdens of life! Thanks again!!!!
I remember Dr. Dickey in Murphy. Always whistling..he and my Dad were just out of the Navy from WWll and they would tell war stories while he worked on my teeth.
The stories are funny and gave me a laugh this morning. I have said this before, we lived beside my Granddaddy Kirby and I tried to spend every minute I could with him. He had dentures and would sometimes take them out to clean them in front of me, one night in my sleep, I woke daddy up. I was gagging and trying to take my teeth out and saying I can’t get them out. Hope y’all don’t mind me writing this, my Daddy was a cut up and loved to joke and have clean fun, one day in the grocery store my young son embarrassed him. While on the aisle with the cans of beans, my son ask him if the beans were poo-poo beans in front of several other people. Everyone laughed except daddy, they knew he had heard his granddaddy call them that name.
Ok…what is your Punkin’…
Thanks for sharing, Tipper…keep on plantin’…and God Bless
Not certain if it was a family term or from my area in Appalachia, but when I was a child, adults sometimes called our heads punkins or punkin heads.
A story about spiders and door to door salesmen and me as a 13 years old girl, getting ready for school. The rest of the family had left and I was about to go catch my bus. We lived in a very old house with lots of cracks and orange trees outside – damp and HOT as this was spring in Florida. Spiders loved our house and we had huge ones that could cover your hand, hairy and were known to chase you. Honest. Anyway, I was very afraid of any spider much less these monsters that lived in the attic and orange trees. As I was brushing my teeth just prior to running out to catch the school bus, a door to door sales man knocked on the screen door which I could see from the bathroom where I was brushing my teeth. Just as he knocked, one of the monster (wolf spiders) appeared between me and the door. I started screaming with foaming toothpaste dripping and ran to the door to get away from the spider. I smacked the salesman as I pushed open the door running by him with a foaming mouth. I’m sure he thought I had rabies or something. He followed me to the driveway to find out what was going on. I explained, he laughed and went inside and killed the spider and then explained it was a roach spider and some people would pay money if you could catch them and sell them as they ate roaches like crazy. Anyway, he was a life saver, I’m sure. He left after seeing I was alone and wasn’t going to buy anything, and I was safe again. Mom and Dad always laughed at the story knowing I probably scared the man more than the spider did me. It really scares me more today, 60 years later, at what could have happened.
My late mum was always loosing her false teeth. On one occasion she fell asleep with them in and woke up the next morning to discover they’d come out during the night and she’d been lying on them, leaving a detailed imprint on her behind of perfect teeth. My son’s always laugh when they remember their granny was the only person they knew that could bite her own behind! Another one was in church. Her upper set were causing her problems and was due for a new set. She had sat down on the pew and was taking her set out of her bag to put them in so she could be able to sing when she dropped them and they skittled under two pews down. Everyone stood up to look for them, so that when the minister came to the pulpit all he could see was people in the first 4 pews kneeling down muttering, ” there! that’s them over there”!…
My dad’s uppers jumped out when he was helping move a baby grand piano at church. The denture skittered across the piano lid but he grabbed it quickly and popped it back into his mouth. Several of us got a good laugh. My grandmother coughed and dropped her plate while in the chicken yard. They say she didn’t hesitate to pick it up, wipe it off, and put it back in. I guess he didn’t want to be seen without her teeth, not even by her chickens.
Three good stories in one day.
Thank y0ou.
Love this story.