Imagine having such a terrible toothache and no access to a dentist that you take a pair of pliers and pull your own tooth. Meet Chester Moody.
It’s 1958 in the Jim Crow South: Lorman, Mississippi to be precise. He is 17 years old, attending Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, a historically black college, and he is in excruciating pain. At the administration office, he is told it will be 21 days before a dentist visits the college, and Black students can’t leave campus.
So young Chester Moody broke into the campus woodshop, borrowed a pair of pliers, and performed his own extraction.
“It took me a while to get the courage, but the moment I clamped the pliers around that molar, the pain went away,” recalls Moody, 84, from his dental lab on the 16th floor of the downtown Sutter Street Medical/Dental Building, where he fabricates dental prosthetics–dentures, implants, and more. “I now know that it was the gas escaping, but I couldn’t walk around with pliers coming out of my mouth. I was screwing up my courage to pull, and suddenly there was a snap and the top part of the tooth was gone! Oh, the smell was terrible but the relief was instant.”
Born in 1939 in Coffeeville, Mississippi, Moody studied to be a teacher. “In those days in the South, there were two professions open to Black men, you could be a preacher or a teacher.”
He planned to teach industrial arts because, hey, he could sure wield those pliers.
Dentistry had never entered his mind.
Now, in life, there are all kinds of luck: dumb luck and blind luck, bad luck and good luck and hard luck. In Chester Moody’s life, three lucky breaks changed his destiny.
Lucky break Number 1 – a terrible job
The first: After graduating from Alcorn College in 1960, he went to St. Paul, Minnesota to visit family. “Now my aunt was taking my cousins to get their teeth cleaned and she said, “You come too Chester,” and we got there, to the Mayo Clinic, and this dentist did the exam after my cleaning and said, ‘Whoever extracted that back molar did a terrible job, he left the root tips in.’ I laughed and told him that was me.”
That dentist, Dr. Louie T. Austin, was the director of dental services at the Mayo Clinic, and “he fell in love with me for my story,” Moody recalls. ” He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.”
Dr. Austin offered Moody a job in his lab, and taught him the trade. “This guy was the greatest teacher in the world. That’s where I got started, in the laboratory, and fell in love with it. “
Moody worked for Dr. Austin a few years, until he was drafted into the US Army.
“I was going to defect to Canada but my mom wept and wept and so I said I wouldn’t go, and reluctantly stepped over the line.”
Lucky break Number 2 – getting rerouted from North Carolina
And here comes the second piece of luck. “I finished basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and was scheduled to be sent to North Carolina to learn artillery. Three days before I was supposed to go, I get called into the orderly room where you get your orders.”
Even today, 60 years later, his face beams with delight as he quotes his commanding officer: “Private Moody, your orders have been changed; you are going to SAN FRANCISCO, to LETTERMAN GENERAL HOSPITAL. They need a dental technician.”
He said he stopped listening after “San Francisco” because he was so excited. He and a buddy had been planning a cross-country trip out here. “I called Jim immediately and I said, ‘Guess what? I am going to San Francisco and my ticket is being paid by YOUR UNCLE!, your UNCLE SAM!’”
The staff dental technician at Letterman was being sent to Vietnam, and Moody was his replacement.
Moody arrived in San Francisco in February 1963.
He lived in barracks at the Presidio. “Imagine waking up every morning and out your window, YOUR WINDOW, you are looking at the prettiest sight you ever saw, the Golden Gate Bridge.”
On weekends he and his buddies explored California. “We went north, we went all along the south coast, we went east. Oh I was in the service, yes, but I was enjoying EVERY MINUTE OF IT!“
Even today, after 60 years in San Francisco, Moody’s speech is molasses-thick with the cadences of Mississippi. His manner is courtly, and he is sturdily built, with powerful arms and hands. He looks much younger than his 84 years, and he often cracks up when he tells his story.
San Francisco roots
He had always intended to return to Minnesota after his service, but he met his wife Georgette in San Francisco. “There were two ladies in the waiting room at the dental clinic at Letterman, and I overheard them discussing issues with their daughters. I went up and said, ‘Tell you what, you give me your daughters’ phone numbers and I’ll take them out and tell you what’s up with them!’ –One lady sniffed, ‘NO WAY!’, but the other lady gave me Georgette’s number.”
They met in February 1965 and were married that May. Though they divorced in 1980, they remain good friends and have three children, now in their 50’s, seven grandchildren and two great grandkids. His second marriage, to Cora, born in Mississippi like himself, “and the world’s greatest cook,” lasted until her death in 2008.
Coming out of the army, he recalls, “I rented a two-bedroom on Golden Gate and Steiner for $135 a month and got a job right away” at $75 a week at Pacific West Lab, in the building where he works today. “I told the owner I would only work there till the snow melts in Minnesota.”
Moody smiles, “I tell people the snow never melted, so I stayed in San Francisco.”
Pacific West Lab was busy. A 100 dental technicians worked there. Hawaii had no lab back then, so they also serviced all the dentists in Hawaii.
“Every Monday three gigantic mailbags arrived from Hawaii filled with dentures that needed fixing.”
Except for a few years at a lab in Oakland, Moody has worked at 450 Sutter his whole career.
Lucky break Number 3: Meeting Roman Braunfeld
And now the third great stroke of luck: A friendship that lasted 60 years and changed his life. Roman Braunfeld was a Polish Jew, a holocaust survivor. He weighed 60 pounds, had TB and was almost dead when the US Army liberated Buchenwald, where he was a prisoner. One of the American soldiers who rescued him was a Black sergeant, also named Chester.
Braunfeld recovered in Switzerland, learned the dental technology trade, married, and emigrated to the United States in 1953.
Moody and Braunfeld had an instant rapport, a deep and abiding mutual respect. They worked together until their lab was bought out. Braunfeld left and started his own lab, Far West Dental in 1970, on another floor; Moody followed shortly.
In addition to a thriving business, Braunfeld did pro bono work for those who couldn’t afford it, including Delancey Street recovering addicts who had lost teeth to drugs.
They worked together until Braunfeld’s death in 2016. In 2006 Braunfeld sold the lab to Moody and his coworker, Lily Louie, age 65. Today the pair work full time and employ four to five people, but it’s increasingly hard to find skilled craftsmen. The City College program from which Lily Louie graduated 40 years ago has closed. Much of the work is sent to China and other overseas labs, according to Moody.
Moody ‘s small studio is a throwback to an earlier time.
To get business, he goes around the building and visits patients in their dentists’ chairs. “I see 12 to 14 patients a day: I match tooth color, I design partials, and sometimes their dentures aren’t fitting right and the dentist will say, ‘Well, what can we do here, Chet?’ “
Moody takes great pride and pleasure in his work. He sees it as a public service and an art. He tells the story of a 19-year-old patient, born with a terrible cleft palate. Moody manufactured an upper denture that was flexible enough to fold up to squeeze through the tight opening of his mouth.
“I have incredible nonbook knowledge that Dr Austin taught me,” he says. “For instance, take your two front teeth. I was taught that from the top of your head to the bottom of your chin, the length of the front teeth should be one-sixteenth of that measurement. Back in the 60’s, you could get dentists to give you that measurement for a patient, but they don’t do that anymore.”
When asked about retirement, he gestures around the busy lab. The place hums and buzzes with the sounds of grinding and polishing. “I am having too much fun to quit.”
On his breakroom table are boxes of assorted chocolates and gourmet cookies, various sweets, all with thank you cards from grateful clients and dentists. “Help yourself,” he tells a visitor, “more work for me.”
