Tom Rogers was introduced to golf as a caddie at the Yarmouth Golf and Country Club, where he was paid twenty cents for nine holes. He graduated from Dalhousie Dental School in 1938 and set up practice in Digby, where he joined the Digby Golf Club – not the “Pines.” Dues were five dollars per year.
After serving in the Dental Corps in World War II, he practised in Yarmouth. He was president of the Yarmouth club for a term and was awarded a lifetime membership when he moved to Shelburne in 1961.

At the Shelburne County Golf Club, he was the first men’s club champion and its third president. Currently he is a member of the South Shore Seniors. He and his wife Elizabeth reside in North Port, Florida, during the winter months, where he plays in two golf leagues. He says River Hills is one of the best. Come and play it.

Tales of a Toothie
Thomas L. Rogers, DDS
144pp, photographs, soft cover
Available from Tom Rogers, P.O. Box 418, Shelburne, NS B0T1W0

What on earth is a toothie?

In this case, he is one of the most remarkable human beings you have even encountered, and this book is a heart-warming, humorous, and ultimately inspiring story of his extraordinary life.

Tales of a Toothie takes you from Tom Rogers' childhood in the small seaport town of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, through a career in dentistry that spanned more than four decades, to his years of retirement.

Anyone interested in history (and surely that includes most of us) will find their imagination fired by Tom's account of family life and of the neighbourliness of a small town in the early decades of the century. Parents and teachers will be instructed, amused, and provoked to thought by his narrative of daily life in the home and at school. Health care professionals and their colleagues in social service institutions will be intrigued by his often-amusing and sometimes vexing experiences as a regional dentist, and by his chronicle of how dentistry has changed in the past fifty years. And certainly, every reader will get many a chuckle, and sometimes a guffaw, out of the colourful characters sketched, and the eyebrow-raising yarns recounted in these pages.

There's a great deal more than winsome nostalgia or rib-tickling humour in this noteworthy book, for it is, above all else, the portrait of a really fine human being. The virtues displayed in the story of this man's life will never go out of fashion, and the world would be a whole lot better off if it had more quiet heroes of the spirit like Tom Rogers.

From the Foreword by Henry Clark, DDS