PROFILE : The Smile Doctors : Mobile Clinic treats children whose families couldn’t afford a dentist otherwise.

Charlie Goldstein positioned himself beneath a dim florescent light hanging above the auditorium stage at Juanita Elementary School in Oxnard. He held a dental X-ray up to the light, took a look and said, “This is a rare one. A kid with no decay. It’s the first one like this I’ve seen in 10 years.”

Goldstein is the chairman of Community Dentistry and Public Health at the University of Southern California. Since 1969 he has led a Mobile Dental Clinic crew on once-a-month visits to communities in Southern and Baja California to treat children of low-income families. The unit usually comes to Ventura County five times a year (this year only three times), serving about 120 children each visit. They were in Oxnard in June and will visit Santa Paula and Fillmore in October.

The staff consists of up to 80 dental students, a clinic director and Goldstein, who came up with the idea for the mobile clinic. They travel around in three old motor homes, a bus and a trailer, all of which are converted into fully operable dental offices.

There are facilities for cleaning, X-raying, drilling, everything short of orthodontics--including 13 regular dental chairs and 26 more easily portable, cardboard chairs that can hold up to 200 pounds. Everything is provided at no cost.

The 12-year-old who got a clean bill of health probably should never have been examined. Before the mobile unit arrives, a group of dentists who belong to the Ventura County Dental Society screen children in kindergarten, first grade and fourth grade (critical ages for tooth development) to find those in dire need of treatment.

“We aim at children who have excessive cavities, who need several hundred dollars worth of medical care,” said Linda Butcher, one of three nurses in the Oxnard Elementary School District. “If the dentist sees pulp exposed, or an abscess, or the child is saying it hurts, we’ll see them.”

So a more common diagnosis would be similar to that of another 12-year-old who had three permanent molars totally rotted, Goldstein said. “They couldn’t be saved even with root canal. Looking at the other teeth, the child had good teeth. It was just one little defective groove at 6 or 7 years old.”

Goldstein said the average child he sees has four cavities on permanent teeth and eight on baby teeth. “They’re in bad shape and all the teeth need cleaning,” he said. “One of the biggest problems with these patients is that the kids are on the bottle and the bottle is left in their mouth too long. Even milk turns to sugar. When they go to bed they should only have water in the bottle.”

High sugar intake and poor hygiene are two other common problems that Goldstein encounters. He said about 95% of the children who come to the clinic have never been to a dentist. And some of those who have, said Butcher, come from families that can’t afford the treatment. “They probably took their kid to a dentist once, got an estimate and never came back,” she said.

Though everyone but the clinic director works for free, the mobile program is a costly operation--everything adds up, from the dental equipment to vehicle maintenance (they paid $5,000 for a new transmission for the bus just before the Oxnard visit). Goldstein figures it costs about $16,000 per visit, while providing, on the average, $40,000 worth of dental care.

Funding has not been all that easy to come by. In 1968 a group of USC students spent a month in the San Joaquin Valley working with the teacher corps and found thousands of migrant workers in need of dental care. A year later, the dean of the university managed to get a state government grant that would pay for a trailer and operating expenses for one year.

Since then, government funds--which ran out three years ago--donations from individuals, corporations and charitable organizations, and grants from various city and county governments (including $25,000 from Ventura County) have accounted for most of the funding. Last year, Goldstein raised about $130,000 from his former students.

It may be costly to run such an operation but there are obvious short-term benefits and some long-term ones, as well. Goldstein examined students in Santa Paula three years in a row, 1974 to 1976, to determine if there were any lasting effects from the dental treatment.

“We rate each case. One is the worst classification, very severe, and four is perfect,” he said. “They started at an average of 1.3. When we were done the first year they were averaging 3.9. And after three years they were still averaging 3.7. Even their cleaning didn’t look bad.”

That success may have something to do with the low-key, friendly approach that staff members take with the children, so as not to frighten them. With a truck named Monster and the character Thor from the “B.C.” comic strip as the clinic mascot, the process is not very intimidating. “It’s very informal. We don’t even wear white,” said Goldstein. “Maybe one kid will cry during the day.”

UP CLOSE: CHARLIE GOLDSTEIN

Age: 69

Vocation: Chairman of Community Dentistry and Public Health at USC

Previous vocations: Private practitioner for 40 years; first dentist to treat patients in the Synanon drug-rehabilitation program

Distance traveled with mobile clinic each year: About 3,000 miles

Worst experience on the road: “The transmission fell out of the bus in Fullerton and we couldn’t make it back to school. We had that happen on a car, too, and had to leave it up in Farmersville to be repaired.”

View from the other side of his dental instruments: “I’m a very relaxed patient--I fall asleep. I can even stand it without Novocain, but it’s much more pleasant with it.”

Most recent personal dental work: Four crowns. “I had a problem of wear on my teeth from my bite. I should have had orthodontic work when I was a kid, but I didn’t until much later. When I was 62, I put bands on my teeth.”