Painless Pavlides

In the Wild West a dentist needed no license--his whole stock-in-trade was a pair of pliers and a drummer boy to drown out the yells extracted with the teeth.

In Manhattan last week, Patrolman Joseph Gardner took into custody a modern exemplar of this excruciating old breed. Officer Gardner got his evidence by spending an evening with one eye glued to a crack in the window shade of Peter Gorgak's barbershop on Third Avenue. Through this peephole he could see in the barbershop mirror an incongruous sight: Mr. Gorgak sitting in his own barber chair having his teeth drilled and dentaled up by a stranger.

His professional curiosity stirred, Officer Gardner rattled the door and demanded admission. When the startled pair let him in, he discovered that the dentist was Costas Pavlides, a native of Cyprus and now a U.S. citizen. According to the New York Herald Tribune, Mr. Pavlides had done dental work freely while in Egypt and "his idea of the U.S. was that a citizen certainly had at least as much liberty as in Egypt and had the additional privilege of voting for Roosevelt."

Officer Gardner did not agree. Mr. Pavlides and his $600 worth of equipment were removed to the police station, where he was charged with illegal possession of novocaine and a hypodermic, and bail set at $500. Though Mr. Gorgak admitted that the treatment had been painless, and that his teeth looked good, he did not plan to pay Mr. Pavlides anything, after all the fuss. "I should pay him nothing," Mr. Gorgak said "--the worry and the bother it cost me."

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