“It was something I stumbled upon, but it would forever change my professional track,” Trask said. While covering for a colleague at a lab that made prosthetic eyes and cheeks for post-oral cancer patients, he was asked to fill in at a clinic that treated infants with cleft palates. He chanced upon the job that would determine the course of his future in 1968, his final year of dental school. Dentistry, he felt, was more conducive than medicine, his other preference, to having a family. Following his honorable discharge, he put himself through community college by working full time as a lineman for the telephone and gas companies in Los Angeles, eventually transferring to UCLA and then UC San Francisco, where he was admitted to the dentistry program. The experience helped him turn his life around. Trask then became an artillery operator in Vietnam, where he suffered permanent hearing loss from cannon blasts. Soon, a judge gave him the options of jail time or joining the military. He also found the camaraderie he craved in a gang. By the time he was in high school, he was working in a butcher’s shop to support himself. “I’m just lucky to have the opportunity to continue giving and receiving from the dentistry field, which has given me so much purpose,” said Trask.īorn in Los Angeles, Trask spent much of his adolescence in an orphanage. Also, his influence as a private practitioner, an advocate for children’s oral health, and a volunteer dentists for schools, nursing homes, and other organizations has been felt and recognized across the region, UCLA said. One would be hard-pressed to find a dental student or resident who hasn’t benefitted from Trask’s experience and wisdom, UCLA said. Giving the gift of knowledge is one of the only gifts you can give that doesn’t diminish what you have.” “The essence of pediatric dentistry is to teach. “UCLA is my happy place,” said Trask, 79, who celebrates half a century of teaching at the dental school this year. But as an instructor and mentor at the UCLA School of Dentistry, the longtime pediatric dentist has found his true calling in serving the wider Los Angeles community. Philip Trask has been a butcher’s apprentice, an artilleryman, a telephone lineman, and a member of a juvenile gang.
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