TCDM TALKS: Dr. Albert Granger

[Music] well thank you for uh welcoming us to have a conversation with al granger dr granger uh and i go back uh quite a ways actually um i know al since 1992 i guess when he first started 91 his uh endodontic program at columbia yeah and um i'm going to just introduce him and then i'm going to turn it over to dr farkas who have a conversation with them but um went to howard for his dental degree went did a general practice residency program at uh harlem hospital and um it was unique program at harlem hospital uh director james mcintosh who i i knew a great great man driving force driving force and alan formicola who was the dean of columbia at that time they developed a very very unique program that i think has had tremendous payback to dental education the community students mentorship you name it it has been just the driving force and i'm going to take the liberty of uh asking out one question and that question is about this program correct al forma cola and jane mcintyre jim mcintosh uh created a program in which they recognized that the black african-american uh community uh as poorly representative represented in general dental educational realms they were even more underrepresented in specialty areas so they developed a program in which harlem hospital after finishing a general practice residency there those residents could come to colombia for specialty training um without cost so that they could become specialist and be back in the community uh and be role models and uh just an incredible program it was begun just before uh al started his program in like 1990 so this was 30 years ago and i think it was a real force i really do so i'd like you to comment yeah we didn't have to commit to teaching for at least five years at either uh harlem hospital or columbia and worked out well it was it was a great experience and there were a number of uh students down at harlem hospital that we never even thought about going into the specialties you know we got comfortable you know we got our school or you know we're making some money everybody's happy but there's another world out there um that was available to us and when those doors opened you know we jumped on it and we were very successful yeah yeah we just you know opportunity yeah opportunity and and mentorship and letting us know what's available and then it's just and just one little push and boom and it's been very successful and you were for colombia yeah at home and and you were one of i mean i can remember we were talking about this before that one of five i think individuals i mean uh uh dr baldwin and dr evans and correct dr white i mean uh shelby white became the head of prosthodontics at columbia yeah john evans is a full-time faculty member there i i mean boland taught there for up until very recently i mean just an incredible mentorship program yes i mean that's what you want that's right we paid back to school that's right but we also was a huge benefit for us i mean i couldn't be more thankful right anyway we welcome you to toro uh and i look forward to listening to your interview with uh dr farkas all right i'm looking forward to doing it thank you thank you dean myers for that introduction um i want to welcome everybody for this first issue if you want to call it that of tcdm talks which are insights with dental industry experts innovators and educators and today i have a conversation with dr al granger noted enzymes on long island noted educator um all-around great guy i try to be well i think you succeeded there you go and in the introduction that dean myers used that occurred to me that you are the living embodiment of toro's mission statements okay okay our mission statement is to graduate outstanding students who will utilize a complex knowledge base and sophisticated perceptual skills to deliver outstanding service to their communities all right you have done that and you continue to do that through both your dentistry and your community service and i'd like to talk to you a little bit about you know your history and your family's deep history and dentistry in long island and so maybe you want to start off you were telling us a little bit about your great grandfather i guess yes so my great-grandfather yeah in uh 1875. he was a kid 16 17 years old got off the boat philadelphia from barbados and um he was taken to by quaker family and they educated him quaker families believe in education you know it's a culture in there and their family they sent him to bucknell ultimately and from bucknell he went to university of vermont medical school and he's a physician he was a physician um so i think he graduated university of vermont in about 19 excuse me about 1890 wow and he had six sons uh five of them went to dartmouth one went to university of pennsylvania three of them were physicians two of them were dentists one of them was my grandfather uh and one of them was a social worker who went to university of pennsylvania he was slumming it he didn't go to the club what you're talking about in 18. he had a real job right and you talk about you know in 1910 to 1925 those are the years when these when all this was happening so this is a long time ago not a long time ago but it would seem to me that these things were difficult to accomplish very much more difficult to accomplish very difficult very difficult but remember he grew up in a culture of learning a culture of learning and that was very important to um my great-grandfather and who happened to be and his wife they both came from families that education was important and moved on yeah so uh malcolm lester who i'm named after my second name um he was the executive director of the urban league for 20 years before whitney young so it was very accomplished that group were unbelievable and so my father and my uncle my dad was a dentist he went to howard university and my mother started at university of pennsylvania dental school and ended up after she met my dad she moved over to howard so they both graduated howard in in 1944. so both your parents were that both my parents yes yeah so my dad had his diploma in one hand and his enlisted papers in the army on the other hand and he went overseas and so while he was overseas my mother came back to new york to be with her her family my dad was my other grandfather my mother's father was a dentist as well and the families knew each other obviously there weren't that many black dentists back in the day so that's how they kind of they kind of met and hooked up and you know while she was there waiting for my dad to come back she said well i may as well keep going so she went to columbia and became an orthodontist and he still wasn't home so she said to me he said you know there's a house available in glen cove um i'd like to buy it we could put you know we could put an office on there when he comes back now he wanted to go back to harrisburg where he was from because his dad had a huge practice he died when he was in dental school he had a huge practice here and very well known in the area but you know he was still overseas so she started to practice in her practice so it's true that women make better decisions well that if you pick the right one yeah that's the only decision you have to usually then wasn't making the choice you know you just think you're making a choice so anyway so she started to practice so when my dad got back from um from overseas he started his practice there and you know he could speak italian and glencoe has a huge italian population and it's tough his office took off wow yeah so but my grandfather practiced down the road and his practice he was the first black full-time dentist on long island and had to happen back in the 1920s they used to go to glen cove for vacation during the summers sure and you know they went to this little house and the next door neighbor was a nurse and said you know doc why don't you start a practice here part-time because nobody will treat the immigrants right who are the immigrants they're irish they're italian they're russian there's a black population there as well so we started practice part-time and it blew up so fast that he had a practice in brooklyn that he sold and they moved to glencoe full time so like about 1925 or 27 i think it was 27. they just moved to glen cove and he started his practice and did very well yeah so again my mother and her brother graduated dental school at howard university uh my brother and my sister and myself were all dentists my sister took over my dad's practice and my brother um once i got my practice and endo started he was in the army who's dennis in the army and my practice is going pretty well and i need some help so i asked him you know why don't you come out and go back to endo school and give me a hand and then he came out went to handle he actually listened and he did yes but the army actually made him stay in there they paid for him to go to to uh so so throughout your family's history there is a um there is service to the community there's actually dentistry this has been a tradition throughout their lives throughout your life yeah well you know so you know my dad was uh on the ymca board for 30 years in glen cove my mother was under chairman of the library board for a number of years in glen cove my brother was a a village trustee in sag harbor for about 15 years ran for mayor lost by two votes lost by two votes every vote counts and i was a city councilman in glen cove and i was on the y board and i'm on the board of northwell what did your grandfather tell you about practicing in the 20s i mean what was that like well like i said you know there was a large underserved populations people don't want to treat immigrants sounds familiar doesn't it right it's going on now right and the immigrants then were the people now who don't want to accept the immigrants nowadays right you know again you know there are obviously there's been a history in in new york state of that you know different waves of immigrants displacing others exactly moving up the ladder the american dream so i don't think enough people realize that by the way and i don't know if we're getting enough education in that i don't think we are because civics is gone so civics is gone but i come from a family from europe my father was in the concentration camp and so we really have an understanding of how lucky we are to be here correct correct uh and i don't think people really appreciate that all the time at this point i know i don't know i don't know but your family seems to have appreciated from the get-go which is so beautiful we're blessed you know we're blessed family because again it's a culture in your family education is really the base and and in our family you had to educate yourself it wasn't even you know whether you're going to go to college or that was not a question i think by the way that's for five generations that ties all the questions together of course you know the education you know no matter where you come from or no matter what you look like correct the education will allow you to thrive yes and i think that that one piece is not is not really well understood before it's well understood a lot of the problems that we have now would not be going would be gone exactly exactly so it's kind of our duty to while we're doing what we can with education at toro college of dental medicine that's at a different level you're not talking about that level you're talking about the level of of uh eighth grade and in high school life exactly and life yeah and um you said something before know starts for when you're a child right reading to you to your child uh you know reading right reading writing and arithmetic having respect for elders you know having manners um i mean it all builds the person and it grows as you go up right it's so important to not state it lately exactly and um what do you think we can do about that you know you just got to keep reaching out keep reaching back keep trying to keep trying to help i think you got to convert people to this idea and get them to do it on their own you know the more people you convert the bigger the crowd becomes and then eventually maybe you make some progress you know he needs people like me these people like you these people like dr hall to reach back and say it's doable come along follow me i'll show you what to do but really i teach the parents to raise their kids like that right so the kids alone can't figure it out the parents have to direct the kids because the parents are around the kids most time so tell me about your endodontic practice how much joy does that give you in going to work every day i kind of tell you before you say that that when i was uh starting this you know building the school i used to come here there was not a car in the parking lot and before we needed we needed a valet service because we have 700 spots and there was no parking so every i had my son here came to i did a filling on him one day and i said to them every day i sit at this uh table outside uh in good weather and have lunch correct and i think about you know every all the blessings that have been given to me and how much i've been able to see over the time yes yes so how does that work with your endodontic practice well you know sometimes you don't have people react to certain things but i'm going to tell you anyway okay so when i graduated my endodontic program at columbia university very prestigious school i could not get a job in anadonica practice no one hired me all my classmates got hired and then like practices no problem right i couldn't find a spot so because i came from the background i do it it wasn't really an issue i said i gotta do it on my own i'm going for it okay i kept pushing forward and the same guy who they said couldn't attract refers i have three offices about to have five offices i have 50 employees 10 10 endodontics working for me in a sense it worked out better for you it worked out better it worked out better but that's because that's because my background you know i mean we're talking about minority communities but there's a huge white population that's uneducated and has the exact same issue it's just not as visible in this area talk about appalachia for that matter you know you have a huge very poor population um that can use mentorship because their culture and their families are in education and they can't get them out of the cycle and it has to be something said about um you know taking first generation students for school right who maybe not have come from an educated population right and and you know helping them move forward because they they came from a weaker background but they're they're still smart they just need a little push and they'll catch up eventually one of the things that i found and this is with with people in my culture with all the students is that as they go through school then the most interesting thing is that their perspective changes right but radically yes um and so this is another thing the the students need to see the complete perspective of dentistry each family lift and get educated and move forward that succeeding generation will be lifted and move forward i have so much help here with alex and the entire faculty who are committed to to educating the best dentist possible correct but we're focusing on dentistry and we're not understanding that dentistry is really a vehicle to improve the society yeah and and that's kind of what we should be doing and that's kind of i think what you were doing when you were the council person council person a city councilman glenn cole for 11 years yeah how how did they receive you on that so i finished my endo program and uh we moved to glen cove my wife and i and we had our our two kids they're just born uh there's 94 and a new administration had come in to the city council in glen cove was a mayor and six council people and one one of the councilmen got divorced and had to leave town [Laughter] so the mayor at the time he said you know what glencove has a diverse population and there's never been any diversity on city council and uh we had met each other knowing each other over years he said let's see if granger wants to do it so he called me and said come on let's see join me and i did and it was a great experience yeah and tom swazi is now a uh he became accounting executive and then he was now where i was in long island with tom schwarzenegger's county executive yeah very dynamic guy and part of the reason why i had to i had the guts to just you know open my practice you know because when you open the practice you're taking all you're borrowing a lot of money sure you know and then pushing ahead and bringing in associates and building another office is because i saw the guts he had to just step out and run against ellie spitzer for governor when nobody wanted him to that takes guts right you know and you know just to face the public can get beat up constantly and again as a counselor makes you wonder why anybody would do that exactly exactly uh but then i realized that you know there's no limits to what you do you just gotta go for it you know go for it so that's my personality down go for it who's gonna stop me nobody except yourself nobody except yourself exactly that's right exactly so um fantastic story obviously um how many associates do you have now we have ten associates and i have two partners these guys started working for me in 2005 right yeah and one of them joined me as a pet as a partner in 2010 and the other just two years ago right yeah then that sounds like a growing business i think you know yeah um well former cola dean former cola and james macintosh right because of them there's 50 people working on long island you plant a seed you don't know how big that plant is going to be you just got to plant the seed and fertilize it exactly right so even now you know i i teach endowed residency program harlem hospital um so i'm there weekly you know and i speak with my residents and i tried to feed them this information it says look i don't care who your patient is they want to be respected they want to be listened to and they want to be cared for and i don't care what population you go to if you if you take care of those three things you're gonna be successful and your practice will grow it's about taking care of people listening listen to them respect them and do the best you can taking care of them and you're gonna be just fine and i would hold true to that in just about anything you do you know i realized at the beginning you could teach what was being taught in 85 and what good was that going to do because the real world was expanding correct and um and because of people like alan durham which is kind of weird because i was friends with his father for 30 years right and then um you know they went into digital they became friends with the heads of three shape we went out to copenhagen we developed relationships with them we went out to california to be friends with the people from dg shape and it's kind of a symbiotic relationship because they need us to teach our students this so that their stu so the students will actually use the machines and understand the technology a lot of the problem with technology is people are afraid of it and they don't know how to use it right and they don't know how to use it and the next generation comes not afraid of technology like if only only only if they're taught early if they're taught independently they know it's available if you think about it the paradigm has always been that we teach somebody something in dental school and then they take it on the real world but because these technologies were flipped they were invented in the real world put to use in the real world and not to in dental school right that became the problem right so we're committed to solving that and we're on our way to solving that and i think most of our students we just had a couple of alumni meetings and we're seeing you know the first fruits of our labor where these students are in are going to residency programs some of the resonate programs have scanners and other things right and the program directors are amazed the fact that how much digitally forward they are all right so now i'm gonna i'm gonna get deep on you here what you just told me correlates exactly with the issue as far as trying to get more minorities or poor people interested that's so interesting exposure exposure early show them what's available there's a world going on out there that they don't even know about you expose them to it and they can integrate it into a lifestyle and grow with it it's all about exposure yeah it's all about and understand but then i'm going to go back to you and say how do we expose them to it what do we have to do and we're willing to do it for example um we're just about to release these scholarships these patterson scholarships correct um and we hope we have students who we can give it to because there are not that many applicants okay how do we get the applicant pool up how do we i mean we're willing to do for example bring high schoolers here give them a day of you know show what dentistry is like things like that yeah i mean like those are easy things to do okay maybe inspire they're not that easy they're not that easy my wife runs a program through through hofstra and she's been very successful um and luckily a lot of people want to support it you know mentors physicians uh nurses uh but it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of money it takes a lot of organization and they get promising students from some of the underserved high schools right and they're brought in they're given college prep courses sat prep courses right to get them get their base strong it's the base that people have uh need help with right the bright kids they just don't have the base right and so they go from high school off to college okay they have another program called the zucker school of medicine pipeline program right and now it takes them while they're in college now obviously they have to have a good grade point average it does the same thing gives them um d-a-t or m-cap it's mcat prep courses right and get them ready take the mcat so they get a good score um and then helps them with college uh medical school applications when the time comes for that it's a beautiful thing it's a very beautiful thing anyway it was more than a pleasure it's been a pleasure thank you i'm sure that we'll be doing this again and we'll have some relationship we're all together but i'd like to bring in alex for a little bit just to say hello all right thank you i'm alexander hall i'm the director of diversity and inclusion at toro dental school and it is indeed a pleasure to have dr granger with us and i am happy to be able to just interview him and first of all um recognizing the world that we live in many times african americans are showcased as being highly trained athletes or very talented singers the successful people are always portrayed as being those kind of naturally talented people that rise to the top correct and it's rare that we have a person that comes from an educational style background that's risen to the top and what's even more impressive is the fact that that you come from a generational lineage of people that have been at the forefront of our community and so it makes it a real honor um knowing that toro the university system is trying desperately to uh stay ahead with uh with leadership and toro dental school is uh trying to stay in the forefront of what our country needs in order to help to alleviate some of the disparities in health care and without saying a whole lot more about how proud i am of you um could you give us some insight as to your thoughts about the climate that we're in as far as health disparities are concerned and what we as health providers can do to try to to try to get other african-americans uh to go into health care yeah oh so i wanna say one thing okay and i i don't wanna be credited with being special because of my family this is just what you do it's the culture of my family right so i look at me and i realize i'm no different than anybody out there if they had a culture of learning in their family okay you see these people in sports if you see them and listen to them they're incredibly smart but their family focuses more towards sports rather than education right so that's where they went they're still smart doesn't mean they're they're not classically educated they're smart right but they went different direction um even some of the drug dealers you see on tv right they may be very smart they have big enterprises they have businesses right they are living on the streets doing the best they could okay they didn't have a culture of education if somebody early pointed them in the direction of educating themselves right now i'm talking about early reading writing arithmetic at a young age and forced the importance of school i'm sure you did it with your family it's been happening generationally in my family so i'm not different than just any other african-american you'll see it's just in my family education was stressed and so somehow we got to get folks early understanding that education is the most guaranteed path to success in the future right i kind of yeah so you know my wife's program zooker at the pipeline program school of medicine they're getting kids when in high school sometimes high school's not even soon enough it really isn't soon enough okay but their kids there they can use that support early right because their their school districts may be over over stressed and can't handle guiding them in the right direction okay um on the college level you get students with potential they may not be as advanced because they didn't have the base knowledge that a lot of these kids have four five six grade seventh grade eighth grade is based knowledge right so they get to college they may not be as strong as some of the other students because they don't have that base knowledge right so you to help them get that base knowledge and move them forward right so as far as you know if i was in your position i might visit some of the colleges and get some of these kids in the sciences in their freshman sophomore year and get them in here and let them see what their future could be and give them some courses so they can strengthen their science courses give them some prep to strengthen the science courses give them some courses to strengthen their dat when they take the dental aptitude test right and then if they spend time with you learning with you when it comes time for them to go down school where they're going to look sure they're going to look with you i think colombia had a similar program and it's been very successful for colombia right sure so it's not about the highest grade they find a number which is you know still one of the highest grade levels you know uh uh score levels at the i'm talking about columbia right uh once you score over that level they pick their class all right that level is hard to attain but that level is still high you don't need the absolute 100 percent you know you could probably fill the class with people score 100 on all the dental aptitude tests right yes without a doubt right sure but then you know you have a sterile group of kids who are very very bright yeah if you want a little diversity a little mix in the class you find a level that's still colombian has the first or second highest level of um d.a.t aptitude test scores in the country but they picked that that level and they picked their student body after that out of that so you got prep kids to the point where they can get a good enough dat score and make sure they're doing well in college and moving forward and if you help them get there they'll participate in your school sure yeah so do you believe in the thought that for a youngster to want to be someone they need to see someone that looks like them to understand that they could be there mentorship is huge yes yes yes yeah so if you look at the news or the newspapers we don't exist they don't talk about us they talk about the rapper they talk about the singer they talk about the guy who's not cheating the head going down the street you know right so we don't exist somehow we need the exposure to say there are a lot of medical professionals who are african-american who who who are there they're successful they're cultural learning in their family and they're doing very well yes right yes so i don't know how you get that information out black history month is one way to expose people let them know that they're very successful hard working people that did very well and live the american dream you can do it yes you can do it come let me i'll help you yes just meet me halfway i have to completely agree with that um in fact we had such a very nice program and i mean unfortunately february is almost over i wish we could live it for for the rest of march and april but our black history uh was really exposed this year we had uh dr leo rouse who was good man he brought about such a a phenomenal message and and the thing that's interesting is that it wasn't a message to just african americans i could see african americans looking at him as being a role model or someone to look up to but what's even more important and it's important for us to have you here because non-african americans need to be exposed to some phenomenal people and i'm not just saying that because it's you that's in front of me i'm saying that because they're people that have achieved very lofty goals that are african-americans and non-african americans need to be exposed to them and i i thought that the dental school in itself was uh really on the forefront uh this month and it's uh it's so nice that we're sort of ending up the month by by having you with us i was just touched just by having the spirit of the community that we have here after we had this program that spotlighted uh health disparities in our country and just to hear students non-african-american in particular to to speak to me about how they recognized the fact that we exposed them to things that they hadn't understood correct so this kind of conversation needs to be had and um i am thrilled to hear about your wife's program i said are you married up no i did yeah so her dad is a dentist as well oh really yeah so i'm excited about uh even learning more about that and the quite possibility of getting involved with okay that's cool she gladly helped you along thank you thank you thank you thanks very much for being with us thank you you

Channel: Touro College of Dental Medicine

Views: 92

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: touro dental, dental college, Touro College of dental medicine, new dental school, digital dentistry

Id: oQIVkQVI-so

Length: 32min 18sec (1938 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021