by Mark McDermott
As a pitcher, Jim Withers knew his strengths.
“I had a reasonable fastball, I had a really good slider, and I had a good curveball,” Withers said. “And best of all, I had good control.”
He knew precisely where the ball was going, among the most elusive and valuable skills for a baseball pitcher. Withers, who graduated in the Mira Costa High School Class of 1957, was a talented multiple sport athlete, but he was a baseball star. He went on to play for USC, and in 1961 pitched a 1-0 shutout to lift the Trojans to victory in the College World Series. Major League Baseball scouts took notice. He was back in Manhattan Beach when the phone call came from the big leagues.
“I had already decided that I was going to go to dental school, but I’m down on the beach playing volleyball, and my dad comes down and says, ‘The Washington Senators want you to come and work out for them in Washington, D.C.”
Withers recalls the scene like something out of the movie “Moneyball.” He was sitting in an upstairs office at District of Columbia Stadium surrounded by a bunch of guys in suits and ties, the Senators’ executives. He’d just pitched batting practice and they were impressed. They asked him how much money it would take to sign him.
“Well,” he said, “I know the Houston Colt 45s just gave Wally Wolf $100,000. I read that in the paper. He was the number five starter on our pitching staff at USC. I was the number one starter. I don’t profess to think you are going to give me that, but I think for me to give up dental school will probably take half of that.”
USC Trojan Jim Withers celebrates winning the College World Series in 1961 with his coach, the legendary Rod Dedeaux. Photo courtesy the Withers family
They offered him $25,000. He turned them down. For most
22-year-olds, the lure of a pro baseball contract would have been impossible to resist. But Jim Withers knew where he was going. He wanted to be a dentist. He went back to school and a few years later, in 1965, opened up his own practice in Manhattan Beach. He would practice there for over 50 years, and when he retired eight years ago, his son Brian continued the practice. Last week, Withers Dentistry celebrated its 60th Anniversary. Though it is a very different kind of business, Withers Dentistry is in other ways not unlike some other small businesses who have survived and thrived for over a half-century, such as Ercole’s, Uncle Bill’s, and the Shellback Tavern.
Brian Withers likes that comparison.
“These little establishments that have been there forever, they’re like little time capsules that give us all a chance to at least experience life like the way it used to be in Manhattan Beach for a little bit,” he said.
Withers Dentistry likewise is a small part of what allows Manhattan Beach to retain the feeling of village.
“They are part of the fabric of Manhattan Beach,” said Mayor Pro Tem Joe Franklin, who attended the 60th Anniversary celebration.
“They are what a local business should be, not just transactions, but relationships,” said Councilperson Nina Tarnay.
After the celebration, Tarnay marveled at the cross-section of the community in attendance.
“They’re a multi-generational business, and their clientele was multi-generational,” she said. “We had people who were patients there whose grandkids attend the practice now, so from the grandparents to the kids who are my age to their grandkids who are my kids’ ages, that’s a rare thing to have in our community….If we want to retain that small town feel, we have to celebrate businesses that help us achieve that by supporting our residents for generations.”
Franklin did the math and figured that if somebody came to Dr. Withers for the first time when they were 2 years old, that person could be 62 years old now. “That means they’ve gone to the same dentist, or dental practice, for their whole life,” he said. “This kind of continuity is almost unheard of, and that’s what makes it so special. A parent can say, I went to Dr. Withers, and now it’s your turn to go. Amazing. He truly is part of the family, and that is what is so touching about the story.”
At the celebration, attendees wore buttons on which they’d written how long they’d been patients of the Withers.
“Some of them had 50 years [written] on there,” Jim Withers said. “That was special…It’s all about relationships.”
“Crown margins fit, or they don’t fit,” Brian Withers said. “Things look good, or things don’t look good. Money comes and goes. But the only thing that you really walk away with are the relationships. At the party we had patients who don’t come to see us anymore, for whatever reason — maybe we’re out of network for their insurance, or who knows, but they still wanted to come and celebrate with us, which I think really underscores that relational part of dentistry. I think it’s easy right now for a dentist office to be very transactional. I mean, you go on someone’s Instagram page and all you see is before and after photos of veneers, or of their shiny new spaceship of a dental office. But you don’t really see any people. And that’s what we’ve tried to do, and that’s the core values my dad built into the practice that I’ve tried to carry on. We don’t just treat the teeth, we treat the people attached to them.”
Jim Withers in the Daily Breeze as Mira Costa baseball star.
Brian Withers has two strong memories of his dad’s office when he was a kid — the smell, and the time he had to go there as a patient. He and his dad had gone to Fox Landing on Catalina Island for the father-son bonding program that used to be called Indian Guides (Adventure Guides these days) when he had a mishap.
“A kid was skipping a stone, reached back to throw it and caught me in the two front teeth,” he said. “This was the summer after my mother had sent out family Christmas cards with the phrase, ‘All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth.’ I was six years old, and I remember walking off the gangplank from the Catalina Express and my Mom’s smile slowly fading as she saw those teeth.”
“I can fix it,” Jim Withers told his wife, Ellen. “I can fix it.”
And fix it he did, something Brian still thinks about every time he fixes a broken tooth himself, restoring a lost smile. Even so, as a young man, when he started thinking about what he was going to do with his life, becoming a dentist was the last thing he thought he’d do.
Like his dad, Brian was an athlete at Mira Costa, Class of ‘99. He was an offensive lineman and team leader on a squad that won a CIF State Championship. Like his dad, he also went to USC. He had knee surgery in high school and went to college thinking he’d like to be an orthopedic surgeon, but everyone was talking about being an entrepreneur at USC, so he switched majors to business. Then 9/11 happened.
“A lot of the guys that I knew who had graduated were getting laid off and moving back home with their parents,” Withers said. “It was really kind of the first dose of reality I had, with people having job security and things like that. And that’s when my dad dropped the hint, which was, ‘Well, if you were to become a dentist, then you’d be your own boss and set your own hours, and you wouldn’t have to worry about something like that.’ That was what kicked off me taking chemistry over summer school, and the rest is history.”
He joined Withers Dentistry in 2008. Working alongside his father was rewarding far beyond anything Brian could have imagined.
“My favorite eight years of practicing dentistry,” he said. “We had so much fun. And it’s funny because I remember, as a kid, my dad trying to teach me algebra, and I thought he was going to grab me around the neck like Homer does Bart [on The Simpsons]. But for some reason with dentistry, we are on the same page, and I had so much fun learning from him. He has a lot of things that they don’t teach you in school anymore. He knows a lot of tricks. He started 60 years ago. I’ve been out [of dental school] for 15 years, so we’ll say 40 plus years of innovation have gone by. They haven’t made dental school any longer, so they had to obviously cut some important stuff out of the curriculum. Things like working with gold, and little things like that, got passed on to me, working with a mentor like that, especially someone that’s as close to you as family.”
Brian, a naturally gregarious guy who ran for City Council in 2019 as a hometown candidate (and who seems destined to eventually serve on the council), also enjoyed watching his dad’s way of communicating with patients.
“He didn’t have a lot of fluff,” he said. “He was pretty no nonsense. And I liked the way that he communicated with patients. He would tell people, ‘Look, here’s what I see here, here’s what’s going to happen if you don’t do anything, and here are the options of what I can do to help you,’” he said. “And I like that. I like not beating around the bush or trying to sugarcoat things. He was pretty straightforward to people. He was a good communicator.”
Jim Withers has been equally impressed with his son, from the time he entered dental school, and then when they worked together, and what he has observed since. He noted that his son continues to take classes, constantly adding to his education.
“Usually, guys take anywhere from three or four years up to 10 years to finally become a graduate,” Withers said. “He became a graduate in about two and a half years. He is probably as knowledgeable as anybody in the field, right on the cutting edge of dentistry and equipment that he has — things that he can do, what’s good, what’s not good, what works, what they are selling and what he should buy…He likes to buy the latest equipment, so it’s become an expensive proposition for him.”
“We’ve tried to balance being a modern dental practice with our community roots and staying true to who we are and really what our core values are,” Brian Withers said. “But also, I’ve spent a lot of time in Seattle, expanding my education. I’ve invested in some of those cool little scanners and things like that. So we’ve been trying to kind of play both sides of the coin, and maintain our small town charm. We’re hoping to do what Manhattan Beach continues to do, which is to continue to grow and modernize, but do it gracefully.”
His mother, Ellen, never worked at the office, but her fingerprints were all over Withers Dentistry. She passed away three years ago but her imprint on the practice remains. Jim Withers, at last week’s party, at one point looked around the office and remarked that his wife’s touch was everywhere.
“She made it very clear that she had no interest in actually being an official employee of the practice, but she had her two main roles,” Brian Withers said. “One, my mom had a really good eye for decorating, so she made our waiting room feel like home. And she probably did that 20 years ago but it still feels like it’s someone’s living room. We still get compliments asking who decorated our front office. Even with new paint and new floors and things like that, which we treated ourselves to this year for our anniversary, that was still part of my dad’s speech. He said, ‘When I look around, I can see my wife’s fingerprints all around this place.’ Another role that she played is that my dad is notorious for his piles — piles of paper everywhere. He has them all around his house. Now that he’s left to his own devices, he can just run amok. But at the office, Jackie, my dad’s manager, would call my mom. I don’t know if they had a secret code or my mom just knew, but she’d come down to the office and she’d just take the bottom half of the pile and toss it out. And you know, the rest of the team would be looking at her like, ‘Oh, my God, she’s going to get in trouble.’ But everyone else was too afraid to do it. But my mom would just come and throw the stuff in the trash, and she’d be like, ‘He’ll never notice. Don’t worry about it, guys.’ So, office decorator and pile slayer.”
“My wife was a superwoman,” Jim Withers said.
Jim and Ellen Withers met in his dental chair, where she was a patient. He’d just broken up with “a little Swedish girl” who on a Sunday night had taken all his clothes and dumped them in her front lawn, which was fine with him because he’d taken a fancy to this pretty patient who’d recently visited his office and had a mind to do something about it. He called her up on Monday.
“I said, ‘This is a social call, not a business call….What would you think about going out to dinner with your dentist?’” he recalled. “So she was off that next night, on a Tuesday night. We went out on a Tuesday night. I went down to her house for dinner on Thursday. I took her to the USC-Notre Dame game on Saturday. And then we went to dinner down at Orville and Wilbur’s, which used to be on Rosecrans. And who would be in Orville and Wilbur’s that night but that Swedish girl who tossed my clothes out on the lawn Sunday night. The last person I expected to see there was her. She came over and said, ‘Jim, I just want to congratulate you and your team on a good game today.’”
Jim and Ellen were married for 42 years. Brian Withers said their manner of meeting would be problematic for a dentist today.
“That would be greatly frowned upon nowadays,” he said. “But I’m glad it wasn’t back then.”
Everything about Withers Dentistry has this sort of longevity and throwback charm baked into it. Most importantly, the support staff is like a family.
“We have a team,” Withers said. “Martha Petredis is my assistant, and started with my dad, and she’s been there 30 years. I know in every industry, they have an insane amount of turnover, and that’s true in dentistry, too. But I was raised where my dad had the same manager and assistants. You just don’t see that anymore. So that is incredibly special to have had Martha with us for so long.”
Mayor Pro Tem Franklin, who lives down the street from Withers Dentistry, was really struck by the people who work there.
“We have to give his staff a lot of accolades. They’re just these special people who really make the patients feel at home and comfortable,” he said. “Nobody likes going to a dentist. But you know, it’s like your neighbor — it’s like going to see Mister Rogers. Go see Dr. Withers.”
Brian, who lives near downtown Manhattan Beach, acknowledged that sometimes his life feels like Mayberry, the fictional little town in the old Andy Griffith show, where people tend to know each other across lifetimes.
“It does feel like we’re in a little slice of Manhattan Beach that has kind of been frozen in time,” he said. “People will say that, oh, we’re losing the small town charm, the small town feeling, right? It exists in my office, alive and well.”
And perhaps this is the thing that the two Dr. Withers have most in common — they chose very specifically to be small town dentists in their hometown. The family’s roots are deep. Jim’s grandparents arrived in Manhattan Beach in the early 1900s, before the town was even incorporated. His grandmother was a charter member of the Neptunian Club and the Manhattan Beach Community Church. When he was a kid, growing up on 23rd Street at Grandview, the whole neighborhood was “young couples with dumb kids” and on weekend evenings everybody would go up to the wilds of East Manhattan to BBQ together.
“By the time that five o’clock had rolled around, five or six guys were having cocktails up there,” he said. “On the corner where Target is now there was a grocery store. Nothing else was there yet. That was all fields out there. They were growing flowers and stuff. Next thing you know, they’re calling up Eddie, who was the butcher, ordering up these great big T bones. And we had a barbecue going by the time the wives came down. There would probably be eight or nine couples all drinking and having fun. That’s the way we grew up. We were out playing hide and seek. You know, the relationships that were in the neighborhood between people were just unbelievable.”
“Back there on the east side of Manhattan Beach, they used to build rafts out there — that was a flood district and it all flooded during the rainy season,” he said. “Guys played Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, floating around on rafts out there.”
Which helps explain why the Washington Senators and their $25,000 offer couldn’t outdraw the idea of going home and becoming a dentist. Fifty years later, Brian Withers came to much the same conclusion — he could chase some kind of business career god knows where, or he could follow in his father’s footsteps. Like his dad, he knew exactly where he was going. And part of the reason is that he wanted to be near his family, and oldest friends.
“Who knows where I’d be if I hadn’t chosen this path, but probably not Manhattan Beach,” he said. “Even if you’ve been successful in entrepreneurship or something else, it’s hard to locate that in Manhattan Beach.”
Some of his old high school football teammates are a bit startled every time they go to their family dentist and it’s their former offensive linemen.
Brian Withers during his Mira Costa football playing days. Photo courtesy the Withers family
“They tell me every time they see me — football teammates, fraternity brothers, guys that I fish with. ‘I cannot believe you are working on my teeth right now,’” Withers said.
He is also able to experience full circle moments on a regular basis. It could be a little boy, like he was when he got his front teeth knocked out, or a senior citizen who suffered a mishap, but Withers takes a special joy in fixing those broken teeth.
“That’s one of my favorite things,” he said. “I mean, I don’t love it when someone chips a tooth, obviously, but I love it when there’s half of a tooth missing and I just get to build it back up, shape it, and polish it. One of the most satisfying parts of the job is when someone comes in with half a tooth and walks out with a big old smile on their face, because they look good as new.” ER
