Retired Tri-Cities dentist turns 100. He credits hard work and a mosquito bite

Longtime Tri-Cities dentist Lester Schilke is celebrating his 100th birthday Tuesday, July 11.

He credits a mosquito bite in part for his good fortune in living such a long life — that and hard work.

He was a student in the first class of the University of Washington School of Dentistry and by 1955, after practicing dentistry in Forks and Aberdeen, Wash., had opened a practice in Richland.

But most of his dental career was spent in Pasco, working five and a half days a week until he retired in about 1987 and sold his practice. He opened on Saturdays for people who could not get off work during the week.

He remembers extracting teeth for $2 or $3 in the 1950s. But that was more than some people could afford. He was sometimes paid with eggs, honey or a pail of milk or not paid at all, he said.

He was on call around the clock. If people were suffering, he would help, he said.

He grew up in Newport, Wash., in a family that had little money.

He worked in logging camps when he was a young man, But his older sister earned her college degree and became a teacher. She urged Schilke to follow her example and go to college, he said.

He took classes at the University of Idaho, Georgia Tech and Western Washington University.

“When you don’t have any money, you go wherever you can,” Schilke said.

UW recruited three students who needed financial help in its first dentistry school class, and Schilke said by a stroke of luck he was one of them.

He picked dentistry because he saw dentists driving nice cars and having spending money.

But he also liked taking care of patients.

“I was lucky to be a dentist and lucky in the service,” Schilke said.

During World War II he was stationed in the Panama Canal and his unit was preparing to be sent to Japan, says one of his daughters, Jan Schilke Berg, of Pasco.

But Schilke was bitten by a mosquito and woke up in a hospital in Idaho with Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can be triggered by the bite of a virus-infected mosquito.

“So he didn’t go to Japan with his troop and most of them passed away,” she said. “So a mosquito bite saved his life.”

With his wife, Joanna “Jo Jo,” who died in 2020, Schilke raised four children.

Berg said he kept a big garden, raising tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash and watermelon.

“He was on his knees weeding the garden until he was 95,” she said.

Before he left for work he would go for a run along what was then a gravel road along through alfalfa along the Columbia River in Pasco. He also lifted weights.

“I used to exercise a lot,” he said.

In his retirement, he and Jo Jo golfed and traveled the world. They visited every continent but Africa and Antarctica.

For others who want to live a similar long and happy life, he has some advice.

One thing that helped him was “you get a beautiful woman to marry,” he said.

Then, “don’t drink too much alcohol. Don’t eat too much sugar stuff,” he said.

His advice if you want to still have most of your teeth at 100, like he does?

Limit the sweets, brush, floss and see your dentist — and stay away from caramels that stick to your teeth.