Bion Rose East was an American professor, a public servant, and a public health pioneer. He was born on May 12, 1885 and died November 28, 1972.

Career

Bion East received his D.D.S. at the University of Michigan in 1908. He was a frontline oral surgeon in World War I.

He was a pioneer in group practice and prepaid dental care, as well as an oral surgeon of distinction. But he looked beyond practice toward prevention. Because he knew how to develop and alliance among basic researchers, public health officials, and men of business, he is credited with a significant role in the nation-wide fortification of milk with Vitamin A and Vitamin D. This did not wipe out dental caries, nor did he think it would, but it did wipe out Rickets as a primary crippler of children.

He went on to investigate the epidemiology of dental caries. This led him to Columbia University where he began as Research Fellow in the then Delamar Institute of Public Health. He became Assistant Professor of Public Health Practice there, then Associate Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Dean of the School of Dental and Oral Surgery. There, and later as Assistant Chief Medical Director (for dentistry), Department of Medicine and Surgery of the Veterans Administration, he carried forward his fight for high standards of research, for attention to the basic sciences, and for greater opportunities for post-graduate dental education. He was especially proud to be Emeritus Professor of Dental Public Practice of Columbia University and to have been inducted into the Society of Sigma Xi--during the years Eisenhower was president of the university.

Political positions

He held passionate positions all his life, but he was human and courageous enough to change his mind. Long opposed to organized religion and in favor of free thinking, in the final years of his life he took great comfort from his Quaker connections. A staunch advocate of prohibition and an opponent of repeal, he said later he had been in error. A lifelong and almost evangelical Republican (see Eisenhower's response<ref> </ref> to a September 2, 1957 letter from East which was prompted by the "debacle" in the recent Wisconsin election, when voters selected a Democrat to fill the unexpired term of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy), he came to find larger loyalties than that of party. Long and unquestioning supporter of traditional American foreign policy who had volunteered in World War I, and who had borne his terrible personal loss in World War II with patriotic stoicism, he became an anti-militarist and an early advocate of total military withdrawal from Southeast Asia. His anguish over what he saw as the destruction of his America via its destruction of Vietnam pervaded his final years.

Personal stuff - most should be removed - reads like Obituary

Family and friends gathered in the Friends Meeting House in Plainfield, New Jersey, on Saturday, 2 December 1972, to celebrate the life of Bion East. In the manner of Friends, the silence was broken by those who wanted to share their thoughts and feelings. Some spoke of his devotion to family. Others recalled his commitment to the ideals of his profession, and the energy and creativity with which he approached and helped solve professional problems. Note was made of his role as wise teacher and mentor, not only in professional education, but with children and young people in his circle of friends and family. His capacity for intimacy in friendship was another theme developed. Those who knew him best in recent years shared their awareness of his struggle to maintain his independence and identity as age took its toll of his physical self.

Not only would he have been pleased at what was said, he would have been gratified at the setting. Although personal history kept him from active participation in the Society of Friends, he valued his ancestral ties, and could trace the influence of ethical and spiritual Quaker traditions upon his life.

He had prideful and loving memories of the Quaker community in Michigan, where he was born and spent his early childhood. He was troubled deeply that those responsible for the care of the cemetery, where his distant and immediate Quaker forebears were buried, practiced what seemed to him to be racial injustice. He made a courageous effort at expense to his physical well-being to change their policy. When he failed, he did not withdraw his support there, nor stop loving those friends.

He also loved Niles, Michigan, where he lived from age nine until manhood. His children and grandchildren came to feel themselves a part of the tradition of nineteenth century small-town life because of the vivid stories he recounted of experiences from childhood on as driver of the delivery wagon for the East Laundry to the hotels, saloons, markets, and to the homes of the notable and less noted families of the town.

Bion East’s parents set for him examples of satisfaction in work, of giving priority to the education of the upcoming generation, of caring for others, and of commitment to community. His sister Reta says he was a tender and fore bearing big brother who never let his concern for her keep him from setting high standards for her behavior! In the last two years of his pain and suffering, their roles were reversed: she was the one who sustained, guided, and protected him. In the intervening years, she and her husband, Ralph McLellan and their children Nancy and Phillip provided an extended family which has always shared happy times, and provided mutual help.

Of great significance in his life was the contribution of his wife’s family. Norma Schmidt’s older brothers were companions of his youth, her mother was a fellow intellectual, and her father was an admired friend. The lives of her younger sisters were entwined with his and Norma’s and their husbands were his dear friends. Kodie’s husband, George Vetter, was in the dental school with him. Shine’s husband, Don Noble, was his “younger brother” who served with him in France and shared with him the ups and down of life between the two World Wars. Belle’s husband, Jack Young, was his companion in Florida and fellow traveler elsewhere in the years of his retirement. He was greatly sustained by their love and friendship through the long years of his wife’s illness and through the last years of his own life.

When he married Norma Schmidt in 1908, they went to Aspen, Colorado, where he began his dental practice. He had an intellectual drive and professional ambition, but no monetary resources or influential connections. It was Norma East who had the courage, the capacity for self-denial, and the social graces, along with vision, determination and energy to match his, which made it possible for him to move out into the larger world which he then seemed to make his very own. This credit to his wife he would not want left unsaid in and review of his life.

They formed a partnership which bore fruit not only for family, friends, and colleagues but for countless others.



It would be impossible to recount here all the friends in his life or all the people he befriended when they needed friendship most. In Ann Arbor, Aspen, Vittel in France, Detroit, East Orange, Ralston, Plainfield, Southport in Maine, there were people he loved. Shurley Hospital, Base Hospital 36, the Detroit Department of Health, the First District Dental Society, the Michigan Dental Society, Cass Technical High School, The Children’s Hospital, US Public Health Hospital No. 9, Michigan Mutual Hospital, National Oil Products Co., Columbia University, the Veterans Administration, Colgate University (where he established the Richard Ives East Loan Fund), the Plainfield Dental Society, The New Jersey State Dental Association—all these institutions evoke memories of vital friendships.

Over the years he pursued many private interests with enthusiasm. In the nineteen twenties he engaged in a number of interesting if not always overwhelmingly profitable business ventures. (When he was extremely hard-hit by the bank closings in Detroit in 1933, he accepted the double penalty for holders of bank stock without undue bitterness of regret.) He was active in many voluntary professional undertakings as well in community concerns in Detroit. His travels on behalf of National Oil Products Co. in the nineteen thirties kept him from community involvement for a while, but when he moved to Ralston he not only raised chickens and vegetables with skill and enthusiasm, he helped to found a volunteer fire company and the Ralston Historical Association. Those who knew Duckworth and later Laurie, remember the tender care he gave to animals and the pleasure he received from their companionship.

A fine athlete in his youth, an eager golfer in middle years, he savored sports as a spectator to the end of his life. Travel was a tonic for him. At age eighty-three, he went to South America by ship, in part retracting from the path of his son who was a maritime cadet before World War II. He returned from this trip elated over new friends, his trip through Panama Canal, and his first crossing of the equator.

Always there was reading. No day was complete without careful study of the New York Times, as well as any other newspaper at hand. His taste in books was catholic. The last two he bought, in January 1970, were Spock’s Perfect and Imperfect and Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins. He cherished his youthful association with Ring Lardner in their mutual hometown and his acquaintance with Edmund Wilson in World War I; he read avidly all that they wrote.

His wry and understated humor delighted him and others. He once enthusiastically accepted and invitation for Bion Rose East to join and association of professional women, and added that he hoped they would accept him without reservation. In the McCarthy era, he received a letter from the security officer of the Veteran’s Administration advising him that he had been the object of a secret investigation and had been found loyal. He wrote in reply, “I am gratified but not surprised.”

A Veteran’s Administration fitness report described him as a “master of diplomacy”. At the same time, it is said that he was known among his students as Bion the Lion. Certainly he could be fierce and awesome as well as charming and persuasive. Underneath the paradoxical exterior, there was however, integrity of heart and mind.

In January of 1971, he suffered a very bad fracture of the right femur. After enduring weeks in traction in hopes he might walk again, he then was fitted with a heavy brace, only so that he might be safely lifted out of bed part of each day to sit in a wheel chair. He struggled through all the usual indignities associated with immobility, but fought stubbornly and sometimes angrily against dependency and disorientation. He wanted most of all to come home. His family was grateful for the competent and compassionate care given him by The Margaret McCutchen Nursing Home in North Plainfield which is under the care of the Society of Friends. After almost two years, he was released by an acute myocardial infarction.

Bion East sometimes compared himself to an ancient oak standing alone on a hilltop, exposed to solitude by the death of less durable trees. Now the mighty oak has fallen its turn. His sister comforted all at his memorial meeting by her reminder that death is not the end of life, but its rebirth.

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