I can’t remember my first visit to the storefront dental office at 524 Main Street in Knox, Pennsylvania, population 1,089, but I’m sure my mother scheduled an appointment for me as soon as my first teeth began pushing through. The first visit I do remember came a few years later when Dr. Myers removed an abscessed tooth. I was only eight, but I can still feel the pain of the infected tooth and vividly recall every sight and sound that accompanied the extraction.

In the four decades since, I’ve spent many more hours in the same dental chair (though fortunately, never again for an abscessed tooth). There have been a few fillings as well as some preventative care – apparently, I grind my teeth at night – and there have even been a few emergency visits, like when my front teeth were almost knocked out during a game of basketball in college. In each case, Dr. Myers was my first call. Even when I moved out of state, I would schedule dental visits around return visits for holidays.

Photographs courtesy of the author.

Over the years, my relationship with Dr. Myers gradually expanded beyond the walls of his dental office. As I became a more active in my community, I encountered him in other spheres of life. When, during my junior year of high school, my church started a youth group, Dr. Myers served as a founding member of its committee. He was also a regular presence at high school and community-wide events, where his distinctive wave and chipper “Hello!” were known to all. He was active in local politics and served on the school board. These aspects raised my appreciation for one of my town’s most prominent professionals, but the single greatest change in my relationship with Dr. Myers came on a blustery day in October 2007, when I married his daughter.

This gave me new insight into Dale Myers’s story. As I came to learn, Dale had chosen this work in this place intentionally, as a practical expression of love and faithfulness to a local community.

Choosing a Place and Its People

Following his 1970 graduation from Knox’s Keystone High School, Dale enrolled in Clarion University, located in the nearby county seat of Clarion, Pennsylvania. Within two years, he also married his high school sweetheart. As for the rest of his future, he found himself torn between a desire to pursue an advanced degree in chemistry or a career in the medical field. In the end, his decision to attend the University of Pittsburgh for his Doctor of Medical Dentistry degree was a choice informed by his affection for a place that he had always called home. He knew that a career in chemistry would likely have meant moving to wherever a job opened up, since there were predictably few openings for chemists in Knox. Dentistry, however, allowed his scientific mind and attention to detail to flourish, while also offering him a chance to practice his profession in a place – and among people – he loved.

My father-in-law’s deep love for the place and people that shaped his first two decades had been grounded in his family’s deep local ties. His mother had grown up on a local family farm that had been dissected by the construction of Interstate 80, while his father hailed from the nearby village of Turkey City. They married before he left for the Korean War, and his father only met Dale when he returned home. A daughter followed soon after.

Dale’s family were beneficiaries of a thriving local economy and an expansive network of relatives, church, and community relations. Holiday gatherings, like the annual Thanksgiving Day potluck at a local community hall the family rented to ensure there was enough room for everyone, were events brimming with aunts, uncles, cousins, and food – lots of food. Because most of these people lived, worked, and worshiped nearby, everyday life was a web of relationships.

The author (far left) playing guitar with Dale and others at a youth event at his house.

Looking back from the distance of half a century, it makes sense that my father-in-law wanted to hold on to the goodness of such a community. Even today, when interconnected communities like the one my father-in-law was born into feel less possible, the longing for connectivity – the desire to know and be known – still exists for many of us. It is not that we are “wired” for relationships – we are not machines. We are not wired for anything. According to Scripture, we are woven for relationships. The one who, in the words of Psalm 139, carefully wove us together in our mother’s womb, has crafted us for relationship with Him and with each other. We are handcrafted for communities where we are known through a multilayered tapestry of professional and personal relationships that don’t reduce us to a title, job, or skill set.

For many of us, changing economic realities and expectations make it difficult to choose – or even identify – how to attain this kind of work, life, or communal interconnectivity. All the more, we should be glad for role models who show that dedication to a profession does not need to be solely determined by personal ambition, and can instead help us create and sustain these kinds of relationships.

I’m not sure how much of this my father-in-law intuited when he moved back home in 1978 to start a private dental practice on Main Street of a little town whose claim to fame was (and still is) that it was once the self-proclaimed horse thief capital of the world. I do know that for the next forty-six years he faithfully served his neighbors through the work of his hands. If “work is love made visible,” as the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran wrote in 1923, Dale’s love took visible form through dental exams, root canals, fillings, and the resulting smiles of those he cared for as he met them in the community.

His willingness to return home and start a private practice in a place where fees would be less than he could charge elsewhere certainly made a difference in the lives of his employees, giving them stability to contribute to their own families and community in a variety of ways. His job put food on the table and his three daughters through college, but it also allowed him to play a role in the healing of the world.

Filling the Cavity

In a world marred by fragmentation, Dale’s life exemplifies the kind many of us long for. We read Wendell Berry and dream agrarian dreams of deep membership and local culture, but the distance between the ideal and its realization feels insurmountable. We feel stuck, trapped by an economy and a set of expectations that make the interconnectivity of small-town life seem either impossible to attain or too quaint for our culturally informed ambitions. As Alan Noble notes in You Are Not Your Own, the traditional hero’s journey was to return from a time of testing to cure or liberate his home, whereas today the hero’s journey is more often portrayed as an individual quest of self-discovery. We no longer need the stability of our community roots for this quest. In fact, any number of readily available cultural narratives imply that these ties can actually work against our self-discovery.

As far as I know, my father-in-law never read Berry, and I am pretty sure he did not think of himself as heroic in any way. He did, however, embody much that Berry has argued for, and he did this with a simplicity and naturalness that I both respect and envy. Once he had chosen his place and his people – or perhaps more aptly, once he had accepted that he belonged to them – he quietly served them for forty-six years as a professional, as a neighbor, and as a participating member of his community. In the process, he quietly made life better for hundreds of people.

Perhaps that is why his death in the summer of 2024, after a long battle with cancer, felt like it left a cavity in our community. Dale kept working as long as he could, but in April of that year he was finally obliged to stop practicing dentistry because he was struggling to walk. Dr. Myers had served his last patient.

In the days following his death, we received friends, family, and neighbors at the funeral home and heard from many about the power of my father-in-law’s example. We also heard from folks who deeply appreciated his care for them and their teeth. They shared stories about a person who had cared enough to really listen to them. Almost all of them expressed a hope that the office on Main Street Knox would somehow stay open.

We shared this desire. Of course, selling the practice would be helpful to my mother-in-law and the family, but our hope was deeper than financial considerations. We did not want to think of our town without the office that had met a real need in our area for decades. It was already difficult enough for people in our area to find dental care because many practices have stopped taking new patients or don’t accept every insurance policy. We knew how difficult it could be to get dentists – or professionals of any kind – to move into rural communities. We were worried that this might be the fate of Dale Myers Dentistry. Then, nearly six months after my father-in-law’s death, a young dentist from a nearby community stepped forward to buy the practice. He plans to start seeing patients this spring. My father-in-law would be pleased. He had hoped against hope – and against the trends he saw unfolding in communities around him – that someone might step forward to serve the community he dearly loved.

Professionals and Amateurs

I have thought about these realities a lot in the months since my father-in-law’s death. In my work with Grove City College’s Center for Rural Ministry, I frequently talk to rural pastors who describe aging congregations and with college students who assume that flourishing lives are most easily achieved in larger metropolitan areas. When I think about how to help these students consider that they might be able to go back to the small town they came from, or go for the first time to a rural area as a teacher, preacher, doctor, or business leader, it’s not the statistics or the reality of the need that they find convincing. I’ve seldom seen people sense a call to invest in a small place because of charts or graphs.

Dale in his office.

I have, however, seen people catch a vision for what a flourishing, interconnected life in a small town can look like by getting caught up in a story. When we send students to work alongside small-town pastors and lay leaders, more often than not the students come back with a new appreciation for what is possible. They have learned a profession at college, but the people they encounter are what will make them amateurs (which means lovers) in the best sense of the word. We need more impassioned professionals and amateurs in small places everywhere.

I too have lived into this story. In 2014 my wife and I were raising two young children as I completed a PhD at the University of Virginia. I had entered the program with a standard academic life in mind, which I knew would likely mean taking whatever job opened up in the tight academic job market. Then something I hadn’t anticipated happened – I started to sense what felt like a call to return home. As we discerned a calling to return to western Pennsylvania to plant a church, several friends and family suggested that we were taking a risk that might negatively impact our financial security or our lives and careers. Against these headwinds, we found respite in an unsurprising place. When we told my father-in-law, the response was different. He knew what was possible, and thanks to him, so did we.