Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Conventioneers fill up city
Three conventions met in Little Rock this week 100 years ago, and another hopped onto a train and started touring the state. That wasn’t unusual. Societies and associations are always coming to town in the archives of the Arkansas Democrat and Arkansas Gazette.
For that long-ago early June, hotels in the city accommodated the second annual meeting of the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association, the 19th annual convention of the Arkansas Funeral Directors Association and the 31st annual meeting of the Arkansas State Dental Association, and civic boosters waved farewell to 100 members of the National Editorial Association, Arkansas Press Association “and their wives” who lingered past the end of their annual confab to ride around the state on a train.
I’m sorry to say the music teachers sound a little dull. They met in the state School for the Blind to take examinations under the Examining Board of the National Association of Presidents and Past Presidents of State Associations. Also, they heard an organ recital in a chapel, ate lunch on a lawn and played their instruments at one another.
They did pass a resolution: They would ask school superintendents and the state Board of Education to allow credits for lessons done in schools or under private teachers — if the students could pass an — what else? — examination supervised by the Examining Board of the association.
The editors and their wives received more, and more indulgent, attention, as they toured about eating squirrels and admiring lumber mills. But really there was more going on among the dentists and undertakers.
My father, who was 12 in 1918, grew up in Mississippi County with such a horror of dentistry that I imagine readers in Little Rock regarded both conventions with equal alarm.
The undertakers were welcomed by Mayor Charles E. Taylor and wore badges. They were entertained by the Little Rock Funeral Directors and Funeral Supply Salesmen’s Club. They read their code of ethics — “very important,” as the late John Healey once told me. Very important.
At the New Capital Hotel, the State Board of Embalming tested 12 applicants to join the association, seven white and five black men.
Practically all of the second
floor of the hotel is given over to the undertakers, and in many rooms salesmen have their wares on view. There are displayed all kinds of goods in the undertaking line, and an assortment of the latest caskets.
Association President Alva C. Harris of Arkadelphia reported that almost 300 undertakers attended.
They rode in automobiles to look at Camp Pike, for fun. A planned trip to Lonoke to see the flight school was canceled because there was no flying; but there were talks by traveling salesmen, committee reports, unfinished business … and the star of the three-day assembly was Professor Albert Worsham of the Worsham Training School of Anatomy, Sanitary Science and Embalming, of Chicago.
He gave demonstrations on the very latest methods of embalming in the funeral parlors of Healey & Roth and at the Old State House. He also demonstrated the use of an X-ray machine.
Conveniently, just that week, a notorious prisoner had dropped dead at the Pulaski County penal farm and was laid out at Healey & Roth awaiting location of some family that might claim the body.
Dr. Albert Sydney Raleigh, 37, “alleged sun worshipper,” prolific author, avowed feminist and alleged child abuser — also known as Hach Nactzin El Dorado Can, head of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Atlantis and Hierophant of the Mysteries of Isis (read: cult leader) — had been cutting brush with a gang of prisoners about noon before he died.
He was appealing his sentence of $200 and six months labor for “contributory dependency,” convicted of causing Mr. and Mrs. Dow D. Ayers of 1317 McAlmont St. and Mrs. Elizabeth Brillhart, who lived with them, to be cruel to the three Ayers children. They beat the kids and burned their clothing.
He fell over dead after sitting on a stump and chatting with a guard.
In photos available online (see arkansasonline.com/ 61118marc), Raleigh wears his hair very long; so it was an interesting detail that the Gazette reported his hair at death was 3 inches long.
Hundreds stopped in at Healey & Roth’s funeral parlor to stare.
Just in time for the dental convention at the Hotel Marion, city restaurants and hotels removed sugar bowls from tables, a wartime conservation measure ordered by the state food administrator. Instead, every diner received two lumps or two teaspoons of sugar in a wee bowl. If the dentists wanted sweeter coffee they would have to ask, and “it would not be considered just the right thing to demand more,” as the Gazette observed.
And speaking of timing, as the dentists arrived June 13, Dr. F.A. Blanchard, “the advertising dentist,” began arguing in district court to get his license back. The State Board of Dental Examiners had revoked it, claiming that he had made false claims of pain-free dentistry in his newspaper ads.
And did he ever advertise. Full-page and partial page ads often included his photo — and prices.
The board revoked his license under its authority per a 1915 state statute letting it defrock any practitioner who published or circulated “any fraudulent or misleading statement as to skill or method of operator or for advertising with a view of deceiving or defrauding the public.” Blanchard replied that he had done no such thing.
This dispute became Green v. Blanchard and made
its way to the Arkansas Supreme Court. On March 24, 1919, the court sided with Blanchard that he had not misled the public as to his skill, his team’s training or the possibility of pain while he yanked teeth. We can read the ruling in pages 137-154 of Arkansas Reports: Cases Determined in the Supreme Court of Arkansas, Vol. 138, which is online here: arkansasonline. com/61118tooth.
So what did the conventioneering dentists do while on the town? They learned their craft, the Gazette reported:
While the meeting is termed “the annual convention” of the dental association, in reality it is being conducted as an advanced school of instruction for the state dentists, or a post-graduate course in modern dentistry.
They learned that nerve blocking was safer than nerve killing, and were advised that they should not — as many dentists did — root out the nerves of teeth standing on either side of a tooth they extracted. “Pulpless teeth” — which the paper at first reported as “paper teeth” — conveyed infection to the rest of the body, presenters said.
Dentists apparently needed all the instruction they got from the “celebrity dentists.” Lectures included demonstrations. In one, a volunteer from the audience let the presenter inject him with anaesthesia. And Dr. George B. Winter demonstrated — on several people — his preferred method for limiting infection after pulling teeth, by scraping the jaw bone.
In order that no patient might be butchered, Dr. Winter, when he showed the wrong method of using his technique and of pulling teeth, used an imitation mouth made of wax and rubber and filled with artificial teeth.
Now that’s the kind of thing people go to a convention to see.