A Conversation with the Honorable Dr. Charles Grim

TC:  I guess the first thing I want to ask you is about how you got into the practice of dentistry. Were your parents or other relatives into medicine and that got you interested?

CG:  Actually, I'm trying to think into the relative range, too, and I don't think I had any relatives [into medicine], and my parents were not in any of the medical professions. But they were both very caring people, and did many, many things for others, you know - really gave of themselves to both friends and church and family and things like that. So I did certainly learn a lot about doing things for others sort of unselfishly from them. But how I became interested in dentistry is that -- and perhaps through their influence in a subconscious way, the way they were, their personalities and things like that - for some reason, I gravitated toward wanting to be in one of the health professions.

And then I lived in a small enough town that you knew your physician, you knew your dentist, you knew your optometrist, people like that. I actually asked the providers that I knew if they would be willing to let me come and assist them if possible, or work with them and watch them in their offices for a little while, and so they allowed me to do that. And I actually sort of enjoyed the environment of a dental office, and the things they did. And the dentist actually let me sit and assist him on Saturdays. He would work like part of a day on Saturdays, and I sort of got to be a dental assistant, seeing what it was like. But that's kind of how I did it. And then I took the pre-professional education, and then when I got into dental school, it did turn out to be a very good fit for me.

TC:  Did you have mentors along with way to help you?

CG:  I certainly had people like my parents, as I said, who were certainly very encouraging about whatever I wanted to do, and getting through pre-professional and professional schools are very demanding, and I got a lot of support from them, and actually there were probably numerous people that I would call mentors, and probably too many to mention, as I got into dental school -- faculty that I looked up to who sort of took you under their wing and would help you, and so I did have mentors like that. I didn't have any Indian dentist mentors at that time -- I didn't really know any Indian dentists at the time, and there were probably very, very few at that time. I don't know the exact numbers, but besides my parents, my aunt and uncle were also very, very supportive, and they - my aunt and uncle - were probably the primary reasons that I got into Indian health service as well. He was the chief of the Delaware tribe of Oklahoma for many years, and she was very active with him. She's Cherokee, and I'm Cherokee by heritage. And my aunt was Cherokee, so they really encouraged me. Because of their sort of activism in Indian Country and Indian politics, I considered going into the Indian Health Service whenever I got through with my dental school education. And I thought I would do that at least for a while, and 21 years later, I'm still here, and now I'm the head of the agency.