Volume 7 • 2020 • Issue 1

CDA at W ork 16 | 2020 | Issue 1 teeth, a 1912 portable dental chair, a 1930s X-ray unit, and a plaster dental cast of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s teeth. Many of Dr. Crawford’s favourites among the collection are dentures and artificial teeth. “My mind goes back to the Romans carving artificial teeth out of ivory, using human teeth from fallen soldiers in the First World War, and even dentures carved from the teeth of hunted deer,” he says. “It’s like he has an encyclopedia inside his head,” says Donna Bierko, coordinator of corporate affairs at CDA, and who worked closely with Dr. Crawford at the Dentistry Canada Fund (DCF). For instance, when Dr. Crawford talks about his life, he remembers the names of long-ago friends and the exact dates of significant events. In 2002, he published a book about the history of the Canadian Dental Association. It starts in 500 BC with the Etruscan civilization’s use of dental prosthetics and Hippocrates’ writings about teeth. “I wrote the book in monthly installments,” says Dr. Crawford. “It wasn’t terribly difficult to do because I already had a fair amount of knowledge on the subject.” Early Life P. Ralph Crawford was born in 1928, “on a lucky day, Friday the 13th,” he says, in Stony Mountain, a small village north of Winnipeg. His family moved to Winnipeg when he was 10. At high school during the Second World War, “we were trained to serve in the military,” he says. “Instead of football or baseball, we were trained to march. Once a week, we’d go to the armoury to do target shooting.” His father, who worked as a guard at the Stony Mountain penitentiary, died of cancer when Dr. Crawford was a teenager and “money was short in our house,” he says. A friend got him a job as a ticket taker at the Famous Players’ Capitol Theatre, the biggest single-screen theatre in Manitoba with 2,000 seats. In 1946, Dr. Crawford dropped out of school to work full-time for Famous Players, and, by 1949, he oversaw the opening of drive-in theatres in cities across Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he met Olga Nazarewich for the first time, a sister of the woman his roommate was courting. “In walked this beautiful young lady, and that was it,” he recalls. Olga worked at the Canadian National Railway (CNR) during the day, and Dr. Crawford worked at the Golden West Drive-In during the evening. Olga got a job as a cashier and bookkeeper at the drive-in so the couple could spend time together. In 1952, Ralph and Olga got married and Olga continued to work at the CNR until the birth of son Patrick in 1956. 5 6 4 Upper denture created by hunter Francis Wharton in 1968 using deer teeth, plastic wood, and household cement.