A real story for the tooth fairy

A dentist recently pulled the front teeth from our three-year-old granddaughter Emmy, following a household accident. Circumstances failed to deter the tooth fairy. In fact, the tooth fairy doubled down on the 50-cent tip to cover the trip to the dentist just in case the anesthesia failed to erase Emmy’s most unpleasant memories.

Here’s a myth: Would you believe a recent survey by VISA found that the average child in the U.S. receives $3.70 per tooth! It’s true. I read it on the internet – so it just has to be true, right? You reckon they want you to pay by credit card?

Actually, the whole tradition of playing tooth fairy is a little weird, isn’t it? Early Norse and European traditions date the myth back centuries but modern practices nearly faded away until 1927 when a book popularized what we would consider the modern tooth fairy. Then, largely due to Walt Disney’s fairy characters, the tooth fairy gained popularity and quickly became a presence in most American households during the past century.

Baby teeth, however, once played a much bigger role in our evolving society, far more important than just perpetuating myth. Have you ever heard about the Baby Tooth Survey?

The current edition of the Missouri Historical Review focused my attention to the time when I still had my baby teeth. In 1958, I was four years old and totally unaware of those turbulent times when concerns were real about nuclear weapon testing and H-bomb production. That was everybody’s problem, really. Nobody really knew the consequences of what we were all being subjected to in the escalating Cold War.

A group of women and scientists organized near Washington University in St. Louis. Soon the 185 founding members of something called the Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) launched a journal called Nuclear Information. One of its most influential articles focused not on the immediate effects but on what could be expected during the year following a nuclear bomb explosion.

The scenario described two bombs striking St. Louis — one eight megatons and the other 10 — amid retaliating megaton bombs exploding worldwide. For the first time, many people began to question if it’s ever possible to win a nuclear war.

About this time connections were discovered about Strontium 90 (Sr-90) levels in St. Louis’s supply of milk delivered to households there and rates of bone cancer and leukemia. The Midwest was dubbed as a “hot spot” but more scientific data was needed. This prompted the Baby Tooth Survey.

The ingenious idea derived from a biochemist at John Hopkins University. He suggested scientists might collect enough deciduous teeth of children to get definitive results. The baby teeth of nine- and 10-year-olds in 1958 were targeted since they had formed in utero and early infancy precisely during the opening years of nuclear testing.

In 1959 a lab was built at Saint Louis University. A massive-shield Geiger counter was built to precisely measure 25 to 90 baby teeth at a time. The baby teeth were crushed between two 250-pound steel plates, each carved out of the hull of a decommissioned WWI battleship. The lab became operational in 1961.

The problem? All this isn’t warm and fuzzy like the tooth fairy. How would you convince thousands of everyday mothers of all races and creeds that scientists needed their children’s teeth more than the tooth fairy?

Donation forms were placed in nearly every public and private school in the greater St. Louis area. Informational campaigns targeted children watching local TV shows like Romper Room, S.S. Popeye, Captain 11’s Showboat and Wranglers’ Cartoon Club. The biggest newspapers serving St. Louis took up the cause.

Initially, the Baby Tooth Survey sought teeth only from within a 150-mile radius around St. Louis. Then came a deluge. By 1962, the survey reported 95,000 teeth collected; in six years there were 287,000 baby teeth collected. One of the big incentives was for kids to wear a shiny Operation Tooth button they received in the mail.

In 1962, after the operation had been testing mostly teeth coming from the immediate St. Louis area, similar projects spawned in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Japan and Germany. The tooth survey in St. Louis, however, remained the largest and most successful. And the effort had impact.

Civil Defense offices found CNI publications invaluable in the effort to alert the public about dangers. Eventually, presidential candidate Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota used CNI findings during Humphrey’s campaign to end the nuclear arms race. But the real political sea change occurred much more dramatically.

On Oct. 30, 1961, multiple seismographs of the U.S. Geological Survey simultaneously recorded a shock that circled the earth three times. The seismic body wave magnitude of 5.25 let scientists know immediately this was not a normal five-point earthquake. The CIA notified President John F. Kennedy that the Soviets had detonated an H-bomb — estimated to be 1,570 times the combined explosive yield of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

On Nov. 1, approximately 50,000 American housewives went on strike in 60 cities protesting the nuclear arms race. There were reports of some women donning a placard shaped like a milk bottle and “topped with the skull” that bore the caption “Milk: Death, Disease, Deformity.”

Leaders in Washington, D.C. attempted an awkward balancing act between showing strength to deter Soviet aggression and compassion to parents worried about their children’s safety. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, only intensified things.

At that very moment, the Baby Tooth Survey’s long-awaited results came in.

CNI research indicated that children residing in Nevada and Utah since 1951 had been exposed to dangerous amounts of fallout from about one-third of the 99 atomic tests conducted in Nevada.

Research showed that at least 12 cases of thyroid cancer occurred for every 3,000 children receiving milk from cows pastured in contaminated areas. Scientists in St. Louis demonstrated that much of the radiation had derived from more recent underground tests, venting radiation in water, soil and sky.

On Aug. 5 President Kennedy signed legislation banning nuclear testing. At the time, scientists estimated that if nuclear testing continued through 1965 as in 1962, there would have been a 100 fold increase in Sr-90 absorption by St. Louis one-year-olds.

The Baby Tooth Survey was discontinued in 1969. By then, the above ground testing had ceased long enough for a dramatic decrease in Sr-90 uptake in St. Louis children. Scientists could assume that as long as the test ban was in place, levels of Sr-90 in Earth’s atmosphere would remain negligible. But the impact of the Baby Tooth Survey was far from over.

In 1963, while CNI was still fixated on issues of radiation, CNI announced plans to tackle related environmental hazards including air pollution with smog, water pollution with industrial wastes, and other technologies that change man’s world. Activists embraced the term “ecology” (from the Greek oekologie, or study of “home”) to identify a way of thinking analytically about the relationships between human and nonhuman nature.

The nation’s first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, was a huge success. It marks a significant moment in the history of the environment and women’s activism. Thus, the women who organized to fight nuclear testing proved to be the staging area for women’s liberation, and the CNI essentially morphed into the Environmental Protection Agency.

Until reading this, I never knew about the Baby Tooth Survey. I just paid my dues of parenthood, 50-cents at a time playing tooth fairy as needed (and whenever I could remember it). Doing so always seemed a bit strange to me.

The real is much stranger than the myth, isn’t it?