The longtime owner and sole orthodontist at the only orthodontics practice in Lincoln County retired Jan. 31 after about 30 years and thousands of patients.
Dr. Rob DeWitt Jr. does not know exactly how many patients he treated in his Newcastle office, although the figure rises well into the thousands, including the children of some of his early patients.
His patients came to the office from Lincoln County, Knox County and as far northeast as Lincolnville in Waldo County.
His loyal employee of 27 years, Sandy Giguere, retired at the same time.
“She was everything,” DeWitt said. “She was the front desk. She made the retainers. She took the records. She did a lot of stuff. I think people knew Sandy as well or better than they knew me because she was the face of the place.”
“She ran the show. I was more her employee than the other way around,” he said. “It was a good, symbiotic relationship.”
DeWitt and his staff were always on time so patients would not have to wait and his patients were happy with their work. “All in all, it worked out pretty well,” he said.
The dictionary defines orthodontics as “the branch of dentistry concerned with diagnosing, correcting, and preventing irregularities of the teeth and poor occlusion” or alignment of the upper and lower teeth.
“It’s mostly braces,” DeWitt said. He occasionally worked with cleft palate patients, but the principles remain the same.
“It’s partly moving teeth and it’s partly orthopedic,” he said.
Orthodontics can improve patients’ health as well as their confidence and self-esteem.
“There are some kids who really have issues and it makes a pretty big difference in them,” DeWitt said. “There’s no question that people’s self-perception is changed.”
As much as they help patients in the long term, braces and the accessories of treatment, especially headgear, can contribute to the awkwardness of adolescence.
Fortunately for future generations of patients, orthodontics now has alternatives to cumbersome headgear, which consists of a metal frame that straps onto a patient’s head and attaches to the braces.
DeWitt favors a device known as a Herbst appliance. “It’s all in the mouth,” he said. A number of similar appliances are available to eliminate what he calls a “compliance issue.” Many kids refuse to wear headgear, he said.
Another appliance of importance but questionable popularity appears to be here to stay.
“The only guaranteed way to keep those teeth straight is to wear the retainers, because straight teeth isn’t what Mother Nature had in mind for you,” DeWitt said.
DeWitt did not initially set out to become an orthodontist.
“I went to college and I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said. “I thought I liked to work with my hands so I went to dental school.”
First, he served in the U.S. Navy from 1967-1970. For most of those three years, he worked aboard a destroyer in Newport, R.I. as the main propulsion assistant to the chief engineer.
“I was in charge of the engineering spaces – the engines and boilers and so on,” he said.
He earned his Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from The Ohio State University College of Dentistry in 1974.
He practiced as a dentist in Presque Isle for the first years of his professional career. “[Orthodontics] was the part of dentistry that I enjoyed and there were a lot of other parts I didn’t enjoy,” he said.
A friend and graduate school classmate called DeWitt one day, told him he was going back to Ohio State to specialize in orthodontics and suggested DeWitt join him. He did, and he completed the orthodontics program in 1979.
He became an officer in the U.S. Army and practiced on a military base in Stuttgart, Germany, ascending to the rank of major. He joined the U.S. Navy Reserve thereafter and would remain in the reserve until the late 1980s, when he began holding Saturday office hours and could not attend weekend meetings. He retired as a lieutenant commander.
He practiced briefly in Georgia and in Portland, Maine before he opened a practice next to Homeport Supply on Route 1 in Newcastle around 1982-1983.
Later, he rented an office at 50 Main St. from Dr. Bill Howell, an oral surgeon. Eventually, he bought the building and combined the two offices. He would stay there until his retirement.
DeWitt said his great-grandparents bought a cottage on Linekin Bay in 1926 and the property remains in the family, so he always had a connection to Lincoln County.
He said he did not want to work in a big orthodontics practice, so the area suited him well.
For many years, he split his work week between Newcastle and a practice in Auburn. For about the last decade, however, he practiced only in Newcastle, which he called “a really good part-time practice.”
Now, just weeks into his retirement, the Damariscotta resident plans to re-enter the work force in an entirely different field. The 69-year-old motorcycle enthusiast will soon start a part-time job in the parts shop at Tri-Sports, a dealership in Topsham.
“If that doesn’t work out I’ll volunteer or do something, but I used to love working in a bike shop,” he said. “I’m not going to sit around.”
He also likes to play acoustic guitar and relax on his motorboat.
He has leased his office to Dr. Thomas Rice. A veteran orthodontist with offices in Bath and Brunswick, Rice will practice in Newcastle 2-3 days a month.
DeWitt stopped seeing new patients well before his retirement, but Rice, who began practicing in Newcastle a couple years ago, will see the few who remain