This will date those in town who remember who this man was; and I can testify to his rare generosity
In recent weeks, I have been consumed with a variety of rather solemnity-stoking tasks, but I thought I would make one little blog entry as a brief change of pace.
Those who remember Dr. Fred Kuhnert (I find from his obit that he was a D.D.S.) in Vernon Township will be those who’ve lived here since the 1970s, or who otherwise (maybe having moved from Vernon) had some path-crossing with this dentist.
An obituary website here gives some info. The picture of him, seen here, that gets bandied about—the same one, with late-’50s “buzz cut,” also turned up in a local newspaper, I think the New Jersey Herald—makes him look as from a very different age, but I remember him as having shaggier, blond hair, suitable enough for the times and for someone of his professional, in the 1970s.
Dr. Kuhnert was my and my sister’s dentist when we were growing up, until we reached 18. He provided us free dental service after my father had died, because Dr. Kuhnert had known my father; they had both been dental students, both getting D.D.S. degrees, at the Fairleigh Dickinson Dental School in the late 1950s. (My father got his degree in 1961; I don’t know if he and Dr. Kuhnert were in the same class.)
Dr. Kuhnert’s wife served as his receptionist and office manager, a typical arrangement for solo-practitioner dental firms in those days.
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Once my father had died, Dr. Kuhnert provided free dental care to myself and my sister until we were 18—and as I was quite young, I didn’t hear when this was announced to my mother and couldn’t fully appreciate what it meant, though I knew we kids got a break. I myself had little need for dental intervention; my sister at some point ended up getting a temporary retainer (and I don’t know if other orthodontic intervention) to straighten her teeth in some way. For this dental situation, I think she also was seen by a different professional, an orthodontist (which wasn’t Dr. Kuhnert’s specialty), in Wayne Township.
Once my sister and I had gone off to college (in 1980 and 1981), I don’t think we saw Dr. Kuhnert as patients again (unless we did for once-a-year stops during breaks home during college), though I don’t think he moved with his family from Vernon Township until well into the 1980s. (His daughter Nancy was a student in my grade, and she is in some class pictures from grade school I have.)
Donald J. Mattucci (a D.M.D.) took over his practice in the old building that was known, and I think still is, as the Sussex Professional Building (though it is in Vernon Township, and especially in the beginning was in a rather backwater location for a building with that title).
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And what is especially relevant here is that Dr. Kuhnert taught me an important thing: a learned professional can, at his or her will, provide free services to someone in need. I applied this, in own low-key way, to some of what I did in the support group realm (in terms of psychological information, since I had a degree in this field) in about 2001-2004 or so. Not that I was a licensed professional, but I knew that providing information or the like based on a specialized education—and anyone with sense in the nexus could regard it via “caveat emptor”—was something I knew could well be offered for free, when a receiving person’s unfortunate condition inspired it. (And as a consumer with often-low income, once in a blue moon I could get free advice from some learned professional or other in my long-road travails.)
Professional services need not always be about “always pay the professional for every fart of services.”
