How Green Were My Mountains?

How Green Were My Mountains? How Green Were My Mountains? LEONARD I. LINKOW Copyright © 2002 by Leonard I. Linkow. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Contents PROLOGUE .................................................................. 9 ONE: My Italian Renaissance...................................... 15 TWO: As Far Back As I Can Remember ...................... 23 THREE: Baseball Blues .............................................. 42 FOUR: In The Army Now ............................................. 58 FIVE: College Days ..................................................... 80 SIX: The College of Dentistry At New York University ..... 90 SEVEN: Passing the Test .......................................... 105 EIGHT: Starting Out................................................... 112 NINE: New Beginnings ............................................. 136 TEN: The Climb Begins ............................................. 149 ELEVEN: Making My Own Path ................................ 161 TWELVE: To The Moon .............................................. 169 THIRTEEN: Climbing Higher .................................... 184 FOURTEEN: War With Little Peace ........................... 201 FIFTEEN: Travels and Travails .................................. 227 SIXTEEN: Beset and Beleaguered ........................... 236 SEVENTEEN: Dilemmas .......................................... 260 EIGHTEEN: Work and Weariness ............................. 288 NINETEEN: Turning Points and Dreams Come True . 306 TWENTY: Old Friendships ........................................ 329 TWENTY-ONE: Bad Business................................... 335 TWENTY–TWO: The Mountains of My Imagination .. 348 EPILOGUE ................................................................ 373 TO MY BELOVED FRIEND, COMPANION AND CONFIDANT, CECILIA. PROLOGUE Create like a god, command like a king and work like a slave— Constantine Brancusi It may almost be a question of whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.—Anthony Trollope I have been a world traveler for more than forty years, but remain a native of New York City. Humans have made no more cosmopolitan place. New York society, primed by old money and the new, lures every form of international business. Ambi- tion soars above the vast grid of buildings; those seeking the power of fame and the glory of fortune (or vice versa) are certain they are the goals of the game and act accordingly every day. The cream and the bastards, as the saying goes, rise to the top. In about equal numbers, I think. For the wizards and the wicked, a misstep followed by a fall in New York can be more traumatic than the upward struggle because it often oc- curs much more quickly. Which is another way of saying, the higher they rise, the harder they plunge. I have struggled to remain at the top of my profession since I began in 1953. Almost from the start I lived and worked according to the credo of the New York business and personal jungle. I played 9 10 LEONARD I. LINKOW by the rules and have tried to write a few of my own. If I was head of a law firm or a high finance empire, I would be lik- ened to “the old lion,” or thought of as a living time capsule for having contributed to a golden age. Momentous eras have passed in these five decades; virtually every nation on earth has been transformed by politics, war, technology and finance. During all, I, a Depression-era child, born in the heyday of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh, worked doggedly to estab- lish a worldwide reputation for innovation, to improve the huge catalog of methods that I developed and to hone my skills in their application. And then I worked even more relentlessly to prevent what I had labored to create from being disparaged, co-opted or ignored. There were, I knew, countless thousands of people around the world who would benefit from my tools and techniques. Wherever there was a community, there was a patient, or dozens, or hundreds; the supply was and remains potentially boundless. People, often in pain, need help. I, of course, cannot provide it for all of them. But I have taught many others at seminars held at institutes and universities around the world. (Some of these institutes bear my name, erected as a result of my unstinting effort to be the main mes- senger of a new technology domain, and as a consequence, its king.) I have done so because, basically, I intended to thrive among the leaders at the top rather than sink to the followers nearer the bottom. I am an implantologist. That’s a rather inadequate and perhaps even a misbegotten term. A foreign visitor not keen on the convolutions of the English language might well take the term for something else–a gardener, a jeweler, a silicon surgeon for the bosom, perhaps even a consultant on factory design. But many Americans (in recent years totaling nearly 500,000,000 annual visits) who sit in the dental chair–the leather-and-steel recliner that would look equally at home on the bridge of a warship–to have their teeth examined, cleaned, drilled or removed would know that I am a specialist, a doctor with expertise in a variety of exotic, high-grade materials and HOW GREEN WERE MY MOUNTAINS? 11 their exacting utility in the human jaw. Because of the nature of dentistry–full, sometimes bloody, and often intimate con- tact with the most multi-purpose orifice of the human body– we are often denigrated. (Even I am among the last to call it glamorous.) What is more, many people, even my colleagues, tend to lump general practitioners, oral surgeons, orthodon- tists and so on together in the facile, all-inclusive and, I think disagreeable rank of ‘dentist’. (A word I am, for lack of a bet- ter one, obliged to use throughout this book.) We are not thought of as medical doctors, at least not in the same way one considers, say, a cardiologist or an orthopedic surgeon. None- theless, when in dental school students are required, as are all future doctors, to submerge themselves in studies on the struc- ture and function of the human body, to become rote experts on anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, and a broad range of other subjects which would by and large play only a supporting role in whatever dental specialty we eventually came to adopt. It is of course all for the noble purpose of higher learning. Generally speaking, the more factual knowledge a doctor (or anyone at all) has, the greater the chance that s/he will become highly competent and successful. If we are lucky and persevere through the long ordeal of dental school and the trials of life, we might gain true wisdom in the bargain. My uphill trek towards the distant, flickering light of wisdom is a long one, by no means over, and anything but direct. I have traveled six continents and worked literally countless hours in my pursuit of professional perfection, to learn more, to be more useful to the patients and colleagues who relied upon me. This journey is five decades long and, much like anyone’s life, it is filled with an abundance of joys and sorrows, triumph and dejection. These extremes may perhaps be wider for leaders in their fields, magnified as they are against ordi- nary, daily human life in a slow-motion cyclone of great change. This change, inspired by innovation, gathers momentum and soon threatens to leave many behind. Sometimes, I fear, the evolution comes full circle and obscures its pioneers. 12 LEONARD I. LINKOW I have been a leader in a challenging and demanding domain of my profession, helping to sustain cycles of invention, application and refinement without pause since 1954. Insti- tutes in Germany, Italy, Romania, Japan, Colombia, and the U.S. bear my name. My reputation runs the gamut: I have been celebrated, vilified, feted, demeaned, adored, sued, hailed and scorned. Sometimes all in the same week. My designs, often among the first of their kind–and granted over 30 patents– have been deemed by many to be revolutionary and ingenious. By now they are a conventional fixture (so to speak) in the profession, a common tool rather than an exotic experiment or a last resort. Nevertheless there are others who, even after all these years in a world of accolades, with designs that are verifiably effective, believe my work is nothing but a hustle, a misguided attempt to complicate the issues of dentistry, to in- troduce new and seemingly strange methods when treatments centuries old had long sufficed. (In my view, this status quo view has been and is driven by explicit fear of change and ulte- rior money motives; or, more bluntly, greed.) I have adamantly insisted–and repeatedly proven–that it is in fact quite the con- trary. I have simplified the lives of thousands of men and women by restoring their appearance and their confidence. They can once again happily perform those functions that nearly every- one else unthinkingly takes for granted: smile, eat, speak, kiss. Through this I have made my living and, on balance, a good one. Guided by my rigorous training, which effectively began in the days of my curious boyhood and continues to this day, I have performed a service that until the late 1970s was pro- vided by relatively few specialists worldwide. I have conducted cutting-edge research, applying the results to the precise and wondrous architecture of the human mouth, jaws and skull. (And more than once, experimentally, on packs of anesthe- tized dogs.) By taking procedural and scientific risks, and by adhering to my sorely tested principles and professional be- liefs, I have developed a wide variety of devices which allow for HOW GREEN WERE MY MOUNTAINS? 13 the permanent, that is, non-removable, emplacement of per- fectly functional, attractive although fabricated teeth. Not den- tures.

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