Dr. Burleigh, Dentist, Leaves Wallingford After 30 years

On Saturday I received this letter from my dentist Dr. Garth Burleigh whose office is at 1212 North 45th Street.

Dear Valued Patients,

Sadly, the time has come…our landlord could no longer repair the building that housed our dental practice for over thirty years. Like many other buildings in the neighborhood, it was sold to developers and will be demolished…

The letter goes on to say that Dr. Burleigh will be working for Drs. Jeff and Annie Knudsen in the U-District at their practice Brush Dental.

I can’t tell you how sad this makes me. I’m already starting to feel nostalgic. You see Dr. Burleigh isn’t like most other dentists. His office is humble not flashy. There were never more than three people working there when I went for an appointment, and many times only two. A person scheduling appointments sometimes doubled as a hygienist. And then sometimes there was another hygienist. But Dr. Burleigh himself cleaned my teeth. There was a little porcelain bowl with a crack in it that I spit into after rinsing.

Before finding Dr. Burleigh, I went to practices where the majority of my time was spent waiting in a dental chair. There would be several rooms full of people just like me. Our teeth would be scraped and cleaned by hygienists and then we would wait until the doctor came to do a once-over of our teeth before moving onto the next room. I never knew when my appointment would end because many a time the office had over-scheduled patients who also badly required the services from emergency dentist East Flatbush to attend all their patients in one stretch. At other dental offices, the hygienists seemed to change every time. Were they students who had to do so many hours to get a credential? Is that why they left? Or were they paid a pittance? And of course there was that sucking tube that they put in your mouth. Maybe those things are good when you’re having surgery, but I’d much rather drink from a  cup and spit into a little porcelain bowl during a standard cleaning.

I liked hearing Dr. Burleigh’s stories about old Ballard when he used to practice there. A lot of Norwegian humor. I liked to look at the humming birds hovering around the humming bird feeder outside his window. I liked that his staff never changed. I’m sorry to say I never learned their names.

I’ll follow him to Brush Dental, but something tells me that it won’t be the same.

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The image shown is not from Dr. Burleigh’s office.