In the late 1950s, 12-year-old Baxter Perkinson lived at Semmes Avenue and Porter Street, a then not-so-good area of Richmond, Va.
Once a week, he’d stand at the corner and wait for the crosstown bus.
For his 5-cent fare, the bus would transport him to another world — a world that he had never seen before, a world where dental health and education were valued and important.
At the School of Dentistry clinic, Perkinson would hand over another 50 cents, earned by delivering newspapers, and have a cavity fixed. He had one in every tooth.
Those years spent taking the bus to have dental students use his mouth as a training ground left Perkinson with much more than a pretty smile. He found a career; a passion that has served him very well over the course of his adulthood, said Perkinson, who earned his Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from the school in 1970.
“There hasn’t been a year that has gone by since I was 12 that I haven’t been a part of the School of Dentistry,” he said in late October as ground was broken for the W. Baxter Perkinson Jr. Building at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Dentistry. “It’s hard to say where I stop and VCU starts.”
Last year, Perkinson, his wife, Elaine, and their four children donated $2.5 million — the largest private gift in the school’s 113-year history — as an unrestricted gift. Because of Perkinson’s many contributions to VCU, the Board of Visitors voted to name the third School of Dentistry building in his honor. Perkinson, who is vice president of the VCU Health System Authority, has served twice as rector of the VCU Board of Visitors, as a member of the School of Dentistry’s Advisory Board and as a member of the MCV Foundation Board of Trustees.
He and his family have provided other significant financial support for the dental school, student-athlete scholarships, the VCU Inger and Walter Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences and the VCU School of Nursing.
In 2006, leaders from VCU and the Virginia Dental Association teamed up to secure $9.15 million from the Virginia General Assembly for the construction of the $20 million, 55,000-square-foot building situated at the corner of Leigh and 11th streets.
Legislators, said VCU President Eugene P. Trani, Ph.D., recognized that a segment of Virginia’s population does not have adequate access to care, which ultimately burdens communities that are dependent on a healthy work force and adversely impacts the state’s economy.
As the only dental school in the state, said Dean Ron Hunt, the school has always focused on serving Virginians.
“To meet the current and future oral-health needs of this commonwealth, however, we needed more space,” he said. “We needed more space for expanded enrollment to help meet Virginia’s dental labor-force needs — more dentists and more dental hygienists. We needed more space for expanded patient care to help meet the needs of dentally underserved Virginians.”
President of the Virginia Dental Association Gus Vlahos (D.D.S. ’81/D) knows firsthand the difficulties facing patients and dentists in underserved areas. He practices in Pulaski County, Va., where he grew up.
“After finishing dental school here in Richmond, I returned home to start my practice,” he said. “I quickly found out that numbers do matter. According to statistics by the state, my county needs five more general practitioners and two specialists.”
“The good news is that I am as busy as I care to be. The bad news is that there are people who can’t be served either for financial reasons or simply because they can’t get an appointment.”
The new facility, which also offers expanded research space and new opportunities to educate Ph.D. students, will allow the school to recruit and train an additional 10 dentists a year from rural Virginia in hopes that they will return to those underserved areas to practice. In addition, the undergraduate dental hygiene class will grow from 20 students to 40 per year, Hunt said.
Perkinson dreams about improving patients’ lives: “To me, this is about better access to care for people like the boy I was.”
Photo: From left — Gus Vlahos (D.D.S. ’81/D), president of the Virginia Dental Association; Ronald Hunt, dean of the VCU School of Dentistry; Eugene P. Trani, Ph.D., VCU president; W. Baxter Perkinson Jr. (D.D.S. ’70/D), VCU School of Dentistry alumnus; and Sheldon Retchin, vice president for health sciences and CEO of VCU Health System.
