Nobody's Straight Man:
The Life and Times of a Pocket Knife
Advocate
By Douglas K. Curley
Copyright 1999 Journal of the California Dental Association.
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After following the above instructions, on the morning of March 12, 1999, the day after Robert E. Horseman, BS, DDS, celebrated his 79th birthday, I sat at the kitchen table with the author of more than 200 dental humor columns. The interview was off to a dreadfully slow start. He has no idea why anybody would want to read an article about him. He isn't sure why anybody wants to read articles by him.
"Whoever got you to do this owes you big time," he said. "I'll bet it was (Editor) Jack (Conley). He can be pretty persuasive."
Dr. Horseman and I had met on a half-dozen occasions during the past 10 years. We even shared the lecture podium at a dental editors conference in Orlando. But despite this familiarity, getting the dean of dental columnists to open up about his art of dry humor and biting wit was, well, like pulling teeth. I thought I was going to have to threaten him with his oft-mentioned "Heavy Black Dogs" to urge him to provide insight into his singular thought process.
"I don't have a mission statement. There's no organized approach to what I do, " he said, providing none of the insight being sought. "That's like Barbara Walters asking "If you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be?" I write humorously because it's the only way I know how to write. I write about teeth because it's the only thing I know very much about.
"The fact that my column has been accepted over the years tells me that people need a little variety from the straight diet of technical, scientific and political material, "he continued. "I've got an article that probably never will be published because it kind of states my views on dental publications. I list five things (see related chart) that are pretty common in dental publications, and humor isn't one of them. I say it should be because it gives you something else to read."
While Dr. Horseman's view of the state of dentistry and all things related has been a staple in the Journal of the California Dental Association since 1982, he has attempted many times to take his meandering thoughts national. Successes have been few and far between, a fact he blames on editors and publishers who lack a sense of humor.
"I tried to get this guy that runs Dental Economics to accept a humor article once in a while," he said. "I never even got an answer from him. To me that magazine is just pure boredom. They're telling you what kinds of stocks to buy and have these articles telling you to be nice to patients. We know all that, but that's what they publish."
Once he starts rolling, Horseman is nothing if not glib.
* * * * * *
Born in Kansas City, Kan., in 1920, young Horseman beat the Grapes of Wrath westward rush when he and his family loaded up in a 1919 Dodge and drove to southern California in 1926. His father, who always wanted to be a dentist, opened a small clothing store in Whittier. The family then moved to Santa Ana, where Robert attended high school and junior college. He then attended USC.
"I was into Ham radio, but as I got further into math and physics and chemistry in high school, I found out I wasn't all that good at it." he said. "Finally, in college, dentistry seemed like a better way to go. We had a family dentist that was a heck of a nice guy in Santa Ana. He kind of steered me toward dentistry."
Horseman graduated from the USC School of Dentistry in 1943. Unattached, he planned to launch a lifelong career as a Navy dentist. But a hobby -- not Ham radios but flying -- took him in a different direction: up.
"Somehow during my sophomore and junior years of dental school, I took some flying lessons," he said. "A good friend of mine was a pilot. He joined the Marines and quickly became a major. The war started in 1941. I got out of school in March of 1943. For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to become a pilot instead of a dentist, which was a crazy, crazy idea. They needed dentists a lot more than they needed pilots. They had millions of cadets that needed dental care."
So instead of picking up a handpiece at the San Diego Naval Recruit Depot, Horseman enlisted in the aviation cadet program. During the next three years, he trained at bases in Illinois, Oregon, Texas and California. His flying mentor was then able to get him a position in the Marine Corps.
Besides having a friend in the Marines, the other reason Horseman says he pursued the Corps was because he "wasn't too crazy about flying off aircraft carriers."
"I figured the Marines flew off islands and large continents," he said. "After I got into the Marine Corps, they sent us to someplace south of Jacksonville, Fla. We flew off of carriers there. I felt like I was double-crossed."
Soon thereafter, the war ended with Horseman never having been shot at in anger. The only thing he ever bombed was San Clemente Island. He toyed with the idea of staying in the military.
"The movies were cheap. The food was good. I was flying any kind of plane I wanted to, almost anywhere I wanted. After the war, everything was mass confusion in the military, which was actually kind of fun."
But, just as quickly, things got serious.
"They wanted us to go to Santa Barbara to do night carrier qualifications. This is a bad thing," he said. "Then they wanted us to go to China. That is a worse thing. I decided it was time to get out."
* * * *
Back at the La Habra kitchen table, I asked Bob where he gets ideas for column topics.
"I was afraid you'd ask me that. I have no idea," he said. "Sometimes I'll read an article. It's a straight article, but it has a wacky, skewed element to it that seems like it needs to be attacked from another direction. If I think about it long enough, sometimes I come up with something.
"The weird part is that most of these ideas come to me in the middle of the night, when I'm asleep. I come up with the opening sentence and maybe the first paragraph. I roll over and go back to sleep thinking I have a lock on the next best thing I've ever written. I wake up in the morning knowing I had a great idea, but what the heck was it?"
To address this nocturnal creative syndrome, Horseman tried what many writers have tried -- placing a notepad on the nightstand next to the bed.
"But then I had to turn on the light, wake up my wife. It didn't work," he said. "Sometimes I remember (story ideas), sometimes I don't.
For years, Horseman's wife, Claire, sought to know why he wrote only about teeth. He would respond that teeth were what he knew best. However, in the past couple of years, he has strayed a bit from a strictly dental course -- mostly through the creation of fictional history.
"I couldn't write a serious piece of journalism if my life depended on it, but I've found I do like writing about times, places and persons," he said. "I don't like researching facts, but if you just make it all up, it doesn't matter. If you make up history, nobody can challenge you.
Horseman's histrionics, while overwhelmingly applauded by the dental community masses, have raised the ire of others on occasion. He keeps on file two "nasty" letters from individuals who took exception to his dry humor.
"I did this story about a product distributor and the program he was promoting, which I felt was a scam," he said. "I thought I had done a good job of disguising the whole thing, so that he wouldn't recognize himself. Apparently he did.
"What the company wanted to do," he continued, "was set up an Amway-type distributorship in your office. The dentist would then peddle a variety of products from the office, from shampoo to corn remover. Most products would have nothing to do with dentistry. Suddenly, you were going to make all this money by selling these things. Then even better, sticking with the pyramid-type thing, you'd get your friends to sell your products. You become a major distributor.
"Yeah right. This was so ridiculous that I had to write a column about it. I thought it was humorous. The president of the company didn't."
Horseman also managed to ruffle the feathers and fur of the state Board of Veterinary Medicine when he suggested, in a column, that dentists could make a little sideline money by cleaning the teeth of animals. He said the only challenge would be getting the animal to sit still long enough to complete the task.
"I got a letter from the president of the board. He took me to task for not reading the Dental Act of 1926, or whatever the heck it was, where it states dentists are not allowed to work on anything but human teeth. I was just facetiously suggesting that dentists could do this. He didn't think it was funny. I wrote him a little apology."
* * * * *
Once Horseman got out of the military, he went back to Whittier, borrowed some money and started private practice. A year later, in 1947, he met Claire. They soon married and had three children, Julie, Jill and Jeff. Like many of his generation, Horseman became a little apprehensive about the world around him and the change in attitudes in the United States during the 1960s. That apprehension coupled with a glowing report and great slide show about Australia got Bob and Claire thinking about moving the family Down Under.
"My folks had gone on a cruise someplace and ended up in Perth, Australia," he said. "They brought back a bunch of slides depicting a beautiful city on the banks of the Swan River. It seemed ideal. We kept reading articles about how Australia was 25 years behind the U.S. There was less crime, less turmoil. The people were fine and easy to get along with. It seemed like a nice climate to raise kids."
To check it out on their own, Bob and Claire attended the World Dental Conference in Brisbane in 1969. They visited Brisbane and Perth and fell in love with the idea of moving to Australia. Horseman met with officials at the Perth dental school, where he learned the country was very open to welcoming American dentists.
"I was told the best place to start working would be the Royal Perth Dental Hospital," he said. "I thought, 'What the heck? I'm 50 years old; might as well give it a whirl.' We applied for some sort of immigrant status. The Australian consulate in Los Angeles interviewed us. Everybody and their brother investigated us. Finally, they notified us that we were official Australian immigrants."
At the time of the migration, Horseman's son, Jeff, was finishing his predental studies at Occidental College. Julie was in her second year at Chapman College and the youngest, Jill, was still in high school. They all went to Australia.
"Jeff immediately applied for dental school at Western Australia and was accepted. So instead of having a $30,000 tuition at USC, it was free, which was a big plus for me," Horseman said. "In fact, since he was living away from home and was of a certain age, they gave him $1,700 a year in living expenses. I loved this place already."
Meanwhile, Horseman was attached to the hospital and also got a teaching position with the University of Western Australia. About a year into the Australian adventure, he opened his own practice.
"If I'd known then what I know now, I would have never had enough guts to do it," he said. "I found this empty, brand-new building in the nice part of West Perth. We laid the place out, got the equipment and started from scratch. We gradually built the practice up, and when Jeff got his dental degree in 1975, he immediately came to work with me."
During the first year as an associate for his dad, Jeff shuffled the patient assignment in order to meet a pretty woman he spied in the waiting room.
"This young lady, Carmel, was scheduled to see me," Horseman said. "Jeff had taken one look at her and said 'Dad, can I have her?' That's when the romance started. I wasn't even aware of it." They eventually married.
By 1976, Bob and Claire were getting a little homesick. Horseman says if they had just taken a trip back to the States for a visit they might still be in Australia. But instead, opportunity knocked.
"A guy I knew in Whittier had some back surgery. He needed somebody to take over his practice," he said. "So Claire and I looked at each other again and said, We did this; let's go do that."
* * * * *
When I joined the staff of the California Dental Association in January of 1989 as the director of Publications, I was immediately informed about this quirky Horseman guy. Bob Ingle, the Communications director at the time, told me "This guy is funny. His column makes you think even dentists have a sense of humor. It's the only thing worth reading in the Journal." Cissy Cooper, the Scientific Sessions director and acting Publications director until I came on, told me that she had looked in the file and found there were only a couple Horseman articles remaining. So she gave this dental humorist a call. Within a couple of weeks, she received a year's worth of material.
Back at the kitchen table, Horseman laughed at the story.
"That's funny. Right now I have 37 unpublished articles on file with CDA. Some of them date way back to the early 90s, so obviously they're not ever going to be published," he said. "They're that bad. As I look at them, I can see why they wouldn't be. But every once in awhile (managing editor) Jeanne Marie (Tokunaga), or Susan (Lovelace) before her, picks out one of these older ones and publishes it."
Horseman's first writing effort came in response to a contest sponsored by Dental Management magazine. He wrote a mostly straight but somewhat humorous piece about his dental experience in Australia.
"It was a documentary, but of course it had some dry humor in it. I won first prize, a week in Grand Cayman Island and $300 in cash. That's the first and last time I got paid that much for writing."
His first piece for the CDA Journal appeared in 1979. By the end of 1982, the Horseman byline was the only one to appear in the "Your Turn" guest column. In 1991, the column moved to the back page and became simply "Dr. Horseman." Today it is "Dr. Bob." Twice CDA has honored Horseman at a Scientific Session. Most recently, Horseman earned fellowship with the American College of Dentists.
Horseman now works for his son three days a week. He figures four days at home is about enough to make him want to get back to work, and three days at work is enough to make him want to go home. He says he'll continue to practice dentistry and write columns as long as the eyes and hands are capable. He also says he'll continue to do both with a sense of humor.
Just before leaving the Horseman La Habra abode, I share with Bob my favorite Horseman. It features a Charlie Hayward illustration showing Bob being confronted by two comic book dinosaur-type creations as he walks around a corner. From the word balloon, we learn Bob is thinking, "It's OK, everything is OK. I'm a dentist, and dentists carry pocket knives."
"What's up with that, Bob?
"You'd have to ask my freshmen dental instructor," Horseman said. "I don't know why, but it was drilled into us that you must have a pocket knife on you at all times. You can clean your fingernails, open packages, and do delicate little operations with it. I'd feel naked without my knife."
Having shared another bit of that which animates him, Horseman turned to the original question: Why look at dentistry and life in general from their oblique angles and with a gently cocked eyebrow?
"Life is too long to do it straight," he said.
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