Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
A smile to last 50 years
Kathleen Roeser recently marked a half century as a dental assistant
In the summer of 1968, America was in turmoil. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy had both been assassinated. The country was beginning to lose faith in the government, and riots were breaking out over civil rights and the Vietnam War.
And Kathleen Bond Roeser went to work for a West Chester dentist, walking into a world she had little familiarity with but which she would come to shape over the following half-century through a love of her fellow man, a faith in God, and a bright smile for those she encountered.
Last month, Roeser, known as Kathy to those she works with, celebrated 50 years as a dental assistant in the practice on West Miner Street. A banner hung across the reception desk at First Dental of West Chester showing photos of her from her high school days, when she began her career, and as she appears today.
“The Lord just led me their
way,” she said of the dentists, hygienists, office staffers and patients she has worked with and met over the decades. “And he led them my way. Time has flown by, but I will still be here for a while longer. They say the first 50 years is the hardest.”
What makes her story the more remarkable is the knowledge that as a black woman who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s in West Chester, Roeser was not immediately accepted in all parts of the community in which she and her family lived. For someone of her background to be involved in the practice of dentistry was a true anomaly, and not without its challenges. Without her particular personality, it might not have worked out as successfully as it did, those who know her believe.
“I think she is an extraordinarily special person,” said Dr. Peter Thompson, with whom she worked as an assistant for 35 years. “She has a tremendous interest in people, and a love of people over herself. She is very unselfish, extremely upbeat, and I can’t remember her ever having a bad day.”
Said Jennifer Rongaus, the office manger at the practice, Roeser, “has dedicated her life to helping her patients through the years and has been an amazing employee to several doctors who have since taken over as others have retired. She is loved by both the patients and the staff that have gotten to know her over the years of her employment here” as she continues her work with Dr. Iliana Tati.
To hear Roeser tell it, there was no certainty that any of this would have ever come to be. As a student at B. Reed Henderson High School in West Chester, “I had no idea of what I really wanted to do.” She even briefly flirted with the notion of becoming and airline stewardess.
But a meeting with an advisor at the high school changed all that.
Roeser was the second of four children of David E. Sr. and Constance Louise Anderson Bond, and grew up in the borough, first on Franklin Street and then on Washington Street. Her uncle, Norman Bond, was a leader of the civil rights movement in the borough, which at the time had quite a bit of overt racism — some businesses and community organizations were outwardly segregated — and not a little bit of racial tension.
But a dentist named Dr. Elwood “Ozzie” Spellman tried to change that. As president of the West Chester Area School board, Spellman began the process of integrating the public schools (Roeser had attended the High Street Elementary School and North Junior High before entering Henderson). In 1968, he decided he wanted to integrate his practice, and asked a guidance counselor for the names of any suitable young black female graduates who might want to work with him.
“Why don’t you apply for it?” Roeser remembers the advisor asking her. “I’d worked since I was 14, so I put my name in. And I got the job. I said, ‘I’ll try it and see if I like it. And I’m still trying to see if I like it.”
Things went well at first, but Roeser recalls being more concerned with playing pool with her friends than working. At some point, Spellman came and sat down with her. “You’re really good at what you do,” she said he told her. “But you need to be more concentrated on it.” She settled down, and began to become friends with the patients who walked in the door. “They start confiding in you, and they become family to you.”
The job of a dental assistant is different from that of a hygienist, who is licensed to clean patients’ teeth and do other more complex tasks. Assistants have a personal contact with the patient and the dentist him or herself that goes beyond those jobs. They greet the patients, make them comfortable, prepare the dentists’ instruments, and help them as they fill a cavity or check a crown. The work is intimate, in a medical way.
And it was not always popular for the person handling those details to be black, Roeser and Thompson said.
There was one patient of Thompson’s, a prominent businessman in the community, who refused to have Roeser in the examination room while he was in the chair. Roeser recalled Thompson telling him, “‘Sorry, she is my assistant and she’s going to be in the room. If that doesn’t work, I suggest you not continue on.’
“But he stayed,” she said. “He wasn’t always nice to me, but I treated him with respect. Eventually, he opened up, and we had nice conversations after that.”
“He treated her like royalty,” Thompson recalled. “He became a regular patient, but he wasn’t interested in seeing me. He came in to see her. Because she treated him with respect. She treated all those around her with respect.”
Roeser said that much of the job she does had remained unchanged over the 50 years she has worked, although new digital technology makes some tasks easier. But her life remains largely the same. She walks home at lunch to the house near where her parents lived until their deaths, and spends time with her family. She plays the Native American flute, and spent time as a champion body builder.
Asked what he learned from Roeser, the now retired Thompson was succinct. “I learned how to treat people, and how to care for people. We’ve been blessed to have her.”