Dental pioneer

SELF PORTRAITDate and place of birth: Oct. 27, 1934, Van Buren Family: Wife June, son Jeffrey Hays, daughters Jana Miller, Janine Osborne.

Advice to dental and medical students: Continue to be a student throughout your career.

Automobiles I’ve owned: Excalibers, Rolls-Royce, Stutz, MGs, Corvettes, Duesenbergs. My primary interest at present is Cadillacs, of which I have four 1959 Cadillacs, one 1960 Cadillac and one 1985 Cadillac.

My favorite ride at present, a red 1959 Cadillac convertible To relieve stress, I just relax and take a nap.

Something you may not know about me: I used to be quite shy and maybe still am somewhat.

The question I’m asked the most: “How can this be done?” If I had an extra hour in the day, I’d read.

Recent reads: Trauma by an emergency room surgeon and Assassinations.

Best advice I ever received: encouragement from one of my professors, Dr. Richard Morrison. When I was a junior in dental school, if my progress was deserving praise he gave me praise and encouragement to excel.

A word to some me up: Grateful - to many friends, relatives and teachers who have helped me along the way in my career.

FAYETTEVILLE - Dr. J.B. Hays was operating with Dr. William Roberts in a muggy basement with sub-par, secondhand equipment. They sometimes saw up to 20 people in a single evening after arriving from a long workday, and other nights not a single patient graced the steps, but they always waited patiently.

Though the conditions and location were relatively poor when the Northwest Arkansas Free Health Center’s dental clinic opened 26 years ago, Hays had seen worse. Much worse.

A medical mission to Haiti just a few years before gave him two weeks of constant work. Patients lined up for blocks, waiting for their chance to have rotten teeth extracted. During the brief trip, Hays lost 10 pounds while desperately trying to help as many people as he could before it was time to return home.

From then on, he had the pressing sensation that there was more he could do in his community. So when the Northwest Arkansas Free Health Center opened in 1986, he teamed up with Roberts to secure contributions from donors, such as the Fayetteville VA Medical Center. The two men bought equipment with money out of their own pockets and began to provide dental services to low-income residents free of charge in 1988.

A YOUNG DOCTOR’S OUTLOOK

Hays, 80, was the oldest of nine children. His parents encouraged them all to extend their educationalthough it was not a popular route at the time, and even helped pay tuition. Hays’ father was a bit of an entrepreneur and owned a few businesses - sawmills, a service station and a trading post - where Hays worked the register each day after school from the time he was 13.

School was a breeze for Hays, who graduated with honors from Van Buren High School at the ripe old age of 16. He earned his own living while his father paid for classes, first at Westark College, now University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, and at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He began as a business major, and just one semester in, he decided to apply to dental school.

During the dental school interview, Hays was told he was too young and would have to wait another year. So he worked hard and increased his score on the Dental Admission Test, and it paid off. At 18, he entered dental school at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dental school tuition hadn’t yet reached the lofty rates of $50,000-$100,000 annually, but it was also before subsidies were available for students charged out-of-state tuition, making Hays doubly grateful for his family’s contribution. A man of few words, he showed that gratitude with dedication to his studies and earned the C.V. Mosby Scholarship in Pedodontics, an honor awarded to only five people in the senior class. When he completed his doctor of dental surgery degree in 1957 at the age of 22, he was the youngest graduate the school had seen in 60 years.

Hays returned to Van Buren for a few months, working with Dr. M.J. Graham at his local dental practice, and with the Cold War’s Operation Dropshot a lingering possibility, he took his chances. He volunteered for the Air Force rather than waiting to be drafted.

In two years of service, Hays practiced general dentistry at the military base in Okinawa, Japan. Many people might view the experience of testing your new expertise in a war in a foreign country as a curse, but Hays saw it as a blessing. He didn’t face patients’ disbelieving guffaws at his age or the timid assignments by superiors. In the military, he was a professional and was awarded newer, greater responsibilities.

“It was good because we had to take care of the dependents and the people in the Air Force, too,” Hays says. “It was the range of different treatments [that I liked].

“We didn’t have an oral surgeon there, so the colonel would say, ‘Hey Jim, would you like to do surgery?’ so I got to do a lot of surgery there, and I knew I liked it.”

His capability for new experiences earned him the rank of captain at age 23.

MAYO OR BUST

When he returned stateside the following year, he opened his own clinic on East Main Street in Van Buren, confident in his own ability and with his sights set on oral surgery. Knowing he had a knack for it already, he applied to the Mayo School of Graduate Medical Education, which according to U.S. News & World Report is among the most selective medical schools in the country, with just a 2 percent acceptance rate.

The Mayo school was not only Hays’ top choice, it was his only choice. He stuck with his instincts, refusing to apply anywhere else.

While waiting on a response, he received an offer from another oral surgery department that he hadn’t applied to, but his patience paid off when he was awarded a Mayo Foundation Fellowship.

At the Mayo Clinic, Hays treated a number of celebrities, delighted to bring a service he loved to the likes of Billy Graham, Ed Sullivan, Danny Kaye and Minnesota Twins home run hitter Bob Allison. Beyond acquiring oral surgery skills, he did medical school rounds to learn the most he could about the human body. It gave him an acute knowledge to make informed decisions about which patients are well enough to undergo anesthesia for oral surgery. By the time he began his residency, Hays was a well-experienced dentist on his way up the corporate ladder.

While at a cousin’s wedding, Hays got acquainted with the bride’s good friend June Hooten, who was finishing up an education degree at UA, and six months later they married. The young couple returned to Arkansas, started their family and Hays continued his solo dental practice, with his specialty placing him a head above the rest. For many years, he was the only oral surgeon in Northwest Arkansas.

“I was very busy from the start,” he says. “I was very busy in general dentistry from the start in my hometown within a month or two. I used to be the only oral surgeon in the three cities for a while. Now we probably have 10 or 11 oral surgeons around here.”

Hays settled into his work while his family grew to three children and he began to take on his father’s entrepreneurial spirit. When he wasn’tpracticing dentistry or safely seeing someone through oral surgery, Hays contracted and financed the building of apartments and nursing homes and invested some of his savings in property.

Over the years, his eye for a profitable enterprise has proved consistent. Popular rental spots Park Place condos, Summersby neighborhood, Misty Hollow and Bay apartments near UA’s campus, Razorback apartments near the Donald W. Reynolds Stadium and 18 subdivisions are among Hays’ efforts. In fact, one of the property investments he made in Van Buren decades ago was eventually sold to a pharmacythat opened across from the town’s Wal-Mart Supercenter. Though he sold it before either business had been built, his sense for a successful spot is apparent.

His real estate endeavors are so numerous that Fadil Bayyari, owner of Bayyari Properties and Construction, says he can hardly do a project without running into something that Hays has owned at one point or another.

“I’ll go check the records in Washington County and find all these properties he’s owned, built or developed,” Bayyari says. “We crisscross each other … he does have a good idea [of a great location].” When work and real estate are pushed aside, Hays’ true love and appreciation is for classic cars. For a while, he owned a Cadillac dealership with a friend, but when it came down to it, he was moreinterested in car restoration as a hobby.

Over the years, he has owned Excalibers, a Rolls-Royce, Stutz, MGs, Corvettes and Duesenbergs, and now has six Cadillacs. As with everything else in his life, he shares. He often loans his vehicles to his friends, family and co-workers at no cost because he just wants to see those around him having a grand time.

His love of classic cars is so signature to his personality that it inspired the theme of “All Up in Your Grill,” this year’s benefit for the Northwest Arkansas Free Health Center, which will honor Hays’ many years of dedicated service to the organization. It will take place April 25 at Springdale Country Club with Bayyari as honorary chairman.

THE GODFATHER

Hays’ long-ago trip to Haiti was the beginning of decades of volunteerism.

He joined the Arkansas State Board of Dental Examiners in 1974, and assessed young dental students’ capability of meeting state standards for practitioners and generally helped them get on their feet as dentists. He served as the president of the board of examiners for a couple of years, and assumed more responsibility as a regional multi-state board examiner from 1985-1996.

“I don’t know how many physicians and dentists he had come work with him at his clinic, to apprentice,” Bayyari says. “He wrote recommendations so they can get into dental school. So many dentists around here, they owe him.”

Hays spent six years alongside a dozen other local dentists providing free dental care to low-incomestudents at Fayetteville High School, and starting in 1989, he focused many of his nonworking hours to establish the dental clinic within the Northwest Arkansas Free Health Center.

“Some of [our] patients have no other place to gofor extractions,” says Monika Fischer-Massie, executive director of the NWA Free Health Clinic. “Dr. Hays doesn’t treat patients here any differently [from those in private clinics]. He cannot turn anyone away. He finds ways to help.”

That caring acceptance is at the heart of who he is.

“He doesn’t complain about being here or the people here,” says Dr. Kenton Ross, dental clinic director for the Northwest Arkansas Free Health Center and once one of Hays’ student volunteers. “He’s nonjudgmental about the patients and their circumstances. He understands that we need [these] things in life.

“He’s from a large family and had to [help] provide for them. He made sure [patients] were taken care of early on, too. He understands.”

Once, during a basketball game with other physicians, Hays sat in a faulty chair on the sidelines that caused a gash deep enough to require multiple layers of sutures. He was advised to stay off his feet for three weeks, but only managed for three days before he returned to the clinic to volunteer, which requires him to stay on his feet while operating.

He still volunteers at the clinic religiously, recruits other dentists to help and continues to give a hand to students who hope to be on their way to dental school. In his 26 years volunteering at the dental clinic, he has personally extracted more than10,000 teeth.

“He’s a magician,” Ross says of Hays. “I don’t know how he gets teeth out as easily as he does, and that’s coming from someone who does the same procedures. He does it better, easily and quickly. Patients [sometimes] don’t even realize he’s taken it out.”

During that time Hays has also helped more than 90 students get into dental school, eight into medical school, and three into graduate studies for oral surgery.

“I’ve taken kind of an interest in medical or dental and dental hygiene students,” he says. “I try to employ them, help them learn about what they’re getting into.”

The experience is rare and valuable for undergraduates and is often the key factor in their entrance to medical or dental school, when a grade-point average or dental admission score might otherwise seem ordinary.

“Sometimes it’s hard [for them] to get a job here because so many people want to have it on their resume that they were doing things like this,” Hays says.

Having too many volunteers is, of course, the problem every free clinic should hope for.

“We’re very fortunate to have him as a volunteer,” Fischer-Massie says. “He is very concerned about [the welfare of] others. He bends over backward for them. If he thinks we need something, he goes out and purchases it.”

“He is greater than life,”Bayyari says. “He helps anybody and everybody, even people he didn’t know. When something comes up to rally behind, he never hesitates.

“He helps family, friends, neighbors and total strangers. We look at him as our godfather.”

Though he is beyond typical retirement age, friends say his energy and enthusiasm for his profession haven’t diminished. He continues to work at Arkansas Oral & Facial Surgery Center and volunteers every Thursday at the health center. He takes time away from his rare fishing hours on his personal lake to volunteer at Eureka Christian Health Outreach (ECHO) and attend the annual Mission of Mercy, a national event that brings dentists under one roof to provide pro bono services to uninsured residents for two days. It has four locations in Arkansas - Arkadelphia, Jonesboro, Little Rockand Springdale - and Hays attends them all.

That he retains status as a diplomat of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, is a fellow of the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons and is a member of state and national dental associations and the state oral surgery society points to one very obvious fact: He is not done aiding others.

“If you can help someone and make them comfortable, you know the easiest way to be happy is to make someone else happy.”