“I went to see my dentist and he asked me what I was going to school for,” Puccio said. “I told him I didn’t know what I wanted to do so he showed me what it was like being a dentist and what it had done for him. I went back to school and switched to dentistry.”
Puccio, who will turn 80 later this month, opened his practice in 1960 in a little house on Central Avenue that he said cost him $17,000.
He later purchased and moved into the old Lincoln School building, where he operated as the Middletown Dental Group until he moved to Breiel Boulevard last year as All About Smiles with his son Jay.
“My first career choice was that I wanted to be my own boss,” Jay Puccio said. “But I found out there is no such thing.”
One time, in 1969 after having just completed some scuba diving lessons, Jim had a young female patient that had gotten into an altercation at Sunset Pool and had her tooth knocked out.
It was after hours, so Puccio called the police to alert them he was going to retrieve the tooth. He climbed the fence and found the tooth at the bottom of the pool.
“The tooth was lying on a black tar stripe at the bottom of the pool,” Puccio said. “I cleaned it and put it back in and it stayed.”
His son Jay, soon to be 50, has been working in the dental office since he was a teenager. He’s been a dentist since 1990.
“When I first got out of dental school, I wasn’t as proficient at pulling teeth,” he said. “So I’d work on them for a while and then he’d come in and get it out. Now, the roles are reversed. Sometimes he gets a tough tooth and I come in to help him.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2852 or Skip.Weaver@coxinc.com.
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