FAIRMONT – It’s not even 9 a.m., and David Bonasso and Barbara Oleyarski-Witt have already leveled one another with enough insults and name-calling to last well into the afternoon.
All good-natured and all in good fun, of course.
And besides, their patients love it.
Bonasso is the dentist and community advocate who retired this week after more than 40 years in his Fairmont practice.
Everyone, patients and staffers alike, mostly call him, “Dave,” because that’s how he prefers it.
Oleyarski-Witt, known by the same as “Barb,” has worked with him as his chairside technical assistant for nearly as long.
Dave and Barb: The best dental comedy team out there.
“Hey, listen,” Bonasso said. “This is serious business. People come here and they’re hurting. What’s worse than a toothache or jaw pain? We have to make it bearable for the people in the chair.”
No doubt, the chairside assistant said.
“A lot of that comes out anyway because of our personalities,” Oleyarski-Witt said.
“We’ve always joked around, and that’s because we want to put patients at ease. We might be saying silly things, but we’re very serious with the work and the patient care.”
“Amen,” the dentist seconded.
A once-and-future dentist decides
Bonasso, 75, grew up in Fairmont in a boisterous family of nine.
Every kid had fun, but every kid worked hard, too.
His father, Russ Bonasso, made that so.
The patriarch, who dropped out of school to go off to World War II, earned a bachelor’s degree at the age of 70, a master’s degree at 80 – and was awarded an honorary doctorate when he 85 and in a hospital bed.
Russ valued faith, family and education, and Dave, his eldest boy, got good grades at the old St. Peter’s High School on Adams Street.
St. Peter’s was a classic, pre-Vatican II parochial school with a rigorous curriculum and nuns in full habit who made every student a disciple of discipline – academic, or otherwise.
“You didn’t get by with anything, that’s for sure,” the dentist said.
Helen Bonasso, the matriarch who was one of the first 100 females to graduate from WVU, was taken by cancer when she was just 44.
That left Russ with all those kids to wrangle as a widower.
Dave Bonasso was only 18 – and his youngest little brother was just 2.
By then, he had earned a scholarship to the former Wheeling Jesuit University, where he studied biology and hitchhiked home along winding U.S. 250 every weekend because he couldn’t afford a car.
Two years in, he transferred to WVU to be closer to family.
He earned a degree in biochemistry and was considering medical school or dental school.
One of his grandfathers, in fact, had died of complications of an oral abscess in the early 1900s – now quite treatable – but that didn’t necessarily inform his decision.
Uncle Sam did.
It was 1969 and Vietnam was raging.
With his graduation, his student deferment had lapsed and he got drafted.
Six months after boot camp, he was training on tank crew, in a unit bound for battle.
Three weeks before he was scheduled to ship out to Southeast Asia, he received another letter, this one from WVU.
His acceptance to dental school.
“So got to go back to Morgantown and I did five years in the Guard.”
The teddy bear tells it
After a residency at the University of Kentucky and a dentistry stint in Oak Hill, he came back to Fairmont to set up his own practice in a former tire shop.
It didn’t take long for patients to roll in, taken as they were by his work and his friendly, family-oriented approach.
He knew their kids’ names. Grandkids, too. And he followed up with phone calls.
“You don’t have to be number on a folder and a set of X-rays,” he said.
“It’s only gonna take a minute to check in the next day to see how somebody’s doing after the procedure. I’ve always done that.”
It didn’t take him long to get into community service, either.
Rotary.
The ecumenical association of churches in town.
Board of director seats on countless outreach services across the region.
In 2002, he co-founded the Youth Academy in Fairmont, a live-facility for at-risk youngsters from across West Virginia, who are fleeing abusive homes and other detrimental circumstances.
With its dormitory-style lodging and a school on the grounds with certified teachers and a full schedule of courses sanctioned by the West Virginia Department of Education, the academy, the dentist said, is a place where kids in crisis can regain their moorings.
Visual evidence of that abounded in 2009 when Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., then governor of the Mountain State, was touring the academy.
That’s when everyone spied that tattered teddy bear, face-down on the bed and among the belongings of a new arrival.
“Right there,” Bonasso said. “This is why we’re doing this.”
Thanks, Dave
In the meantime, he’ll keep doing all that community service for which he’s known.
“We’re put on this Earth to help our neighbors,” he said.
Well, that, and to visit family.
His children and grandchildren are scattered out and about, and he and his wife, Rosemary, are planning more than few road trips.
And the practice, with its range of full-service dentistry, will continue.
His associate, Dr. Matt Kime, has already welcomed another dentist, Eamonn Cronin, a Fairmont State alum and spring dental school graduate from WVU in, for the next chapter.
Two job offers had already come Kime’s way when he went to work with Bonasso in 2006.
Just like Barb Oleyarski-Witt, personalities sealed the deal.
“We pretty much have the same approach,” Kime said.
And this boss, he said, pretty much had the blueprint for success.
“You look at Dave, and you see a guy who is always there for his patients and his community. This is how it’s supposed to be done.”
TWEET @DominionPostWV
