Dr. D. I. Trotti

Durward Isaiah Trotti was married to Honor B. Handley on November 29, 1933.

Father of two daughters: Kathryn Ann and Sara Bess.

Four grandchildren

Dr. Trotti was the dentist in Newton, Texas, for many, many years.

~

ONCE UPON A TIME - Nida Marshall - Author and interviewer of ONCE UPON A TIME stories on KTXJ Radio in Jasper, Texas
First National Bank of Jasper, KTXJ
Wednesday, September 27, 1978

ONCE UPON A TIME, a Jasper high school graduate became quite a respectable citizen and a pretty well known dentist.

While in Texas Dental School in Houston he hung around every pool hall in the City of Houston and even practiced tooth pulling on the poor, unsuspecting folks up in Bronson before he got himself graduated. Only time will tell if he will every amount to anything. He's been a dentist now for only 49 1/2 years.

He is, of course, Durward I. Trotti, D.DS., of Newton, formerly of Jasper, and, perhaps, we ought to whitewash a little the exposition of his sinful past. He did come of good families, descendants of East Texas pioneers, L.I. and Lonnie Harper Trotti. Born near Jasper, he with his family moved shortly afterward to Farrsville, and he started to school in Newton. In 1914 the family moved back here on the Burkeville highway near what is know now as the Berryman place. Like everybody else around here, he walked into school every day, a distance of at least three miles. But, by his senior year, the Trotti's had moved into town a town at the corner of North Peachtree and Ogden streets, in the house still standing and owned by Isabella Weaver. There were two sisters, Hattie and Lela and two brothers, W.L. (Bill) and Bernice. Hattie (Hattie Boynton Capps) laughs as she remembers that Durward, the baby of the family, in the eyes of their mother, could do no wrong. The kids labeled him "Mama's Joseph' and always predicted he would get a 'coat of many colors'.....Durward was in that famous Jasper high school graduating class of 1924 - the very first group of seniors to begin and end their senior year in the brand new brick building. At the graduation exercises on that warm spring evening in that grand new auditorium, the class colors of orange and white flying, the valedictorian Edna Sims Owens gave an address with the lofty title, "Success Measured By Service," and the class son was sung, "Happy Days are Gliding." They could have added that the class 'bird' was the chicken and that on HAPPY NIGHTS this pious group glided themselves out to unsuspecting neighbors' chicken yards, and there somehow evolved a carefully hidden chicken coop way down on the lower end of the school yard itself, Somehow, the chickens in the coop would multiply eventually until there was sufficient number of various breeds for an old-fashioned, southern chicken-fry of a sorts on moonlight nights down on Sandy Creek. Naturally, some of those wild senior girls would be there, too, among them, Hoot Gibson and Kitty Fay Brown, Alice and Sis Hancock and Ruby Munson.

While none of the group ever seems to have been jailed for chicken stealing, they did get caught in a school protest with disastrous results for some. This was before J.F. Parnell, our new tough superintendent, took over. Walking through town on his way to school one morning, Durward was accosted the majority of the class hanging around Campbell's store on what is now the corner of N. Main and E. Lamar. A popular English teacher had been fired and the explanations offered by the school board did not meet with approval of some of the students. They were just not going to school that day but instead would enjoy themselves lolling around Sandy Creek. "Mama's Joseph" was perfectly willing to join in the protest but not to loll around with the dissenting group on Sandy Creek all day. He betook himself home to do a little serous fishing, another sinful habit which he just hasn't been able to shake even to this day. As a result the Sandy Creek group found itself expelled for three whole days, but their records don't seem to have seriously crippled any of them for life.

ONCE UPON A TIME folks around Jasper remember young Durward Trotti as an energetic soda jerk after school, on weekends and during summer vacations at the old Henderson and Stone Drug Stores...The time was the early 1920's. Boys like durward and Ide Adams and Gerald Few ran around dispensing cherry sodas and dipping up "Say-Sos', East Texas jargon back then for ice cream cones - vanilla or chocolate or strawberry. A new flavor, banana nut, was just beginning to come in. They gave curb service with a flourish, hoisting the trays with one hand, containing more times than not a five cent fountain coke and a glass of ice water. They tended the drugstore in general, cleaning the fountain and sweeping out and keeping the wood stove stoked in the winter. The old cast iron heater sat squarely in a bed of sand, the sand box serving dual purposes - a fire preventative plus being a dandy giant spittoon. They worked ten-hour days. Drugstores didn't close then until 10 o'clock at night and much later on Saturday nights. It might be well after midnight on Saturday nights - everybody had to come into town - when they got to the unholy job of packing down the five gallon ice cream cans. Woe be to the soda jerk who ever let the ice-cream melt. Blocks of ice delivered from the ice house in the old team-drawn ice wagon had to be cranked in a crude old ice crusher and then the stuff salted down securely around the cans. Durward, the son of L.I. and Lonie Harper Trotti members of pioneer East Texas families, was saving his money to go to medical school. In his boyhood he had hung around the offices of his uncle, Dr. W.E. Trotti, and he know he wanted to be a doctor. Alternately, Durward had worked for the Henderson brothers, Jack and David, and the Stones, Joe and Clarence in the drugstores and for his brother, Bill Trotti, a well known contractor, doing such things as helping pour the foundation for Hudnall Lanier's big new cotton gin in Happy Hollow, and for Homer Gibbs' big red brick home up on the corner of N. Main and W. Milam, possibly the first brick home in Jasper.
A graduate of the J.H.S. class of '24, he worked another year before entering college, and here he had to make a major decision. In those days, medical school took six whole years and dental school, four, and he figured he couldn't last out two more years of starvation. At a time when few East Texas youths had any chance at higher education at all, durward received help and encouragement from a kindly brother-in-law, Dr. H. A. Mallett, a Huntsville dentist, his sister Lela's husband. It was a hard four years. Dr. Trotti says he would never have made it without Houston's pool halls. As a plain clothes man, he investigated certain illegal operations, and this provided him with a little board money.
In the summer before he graduated, he took some portable dental equipment up to Bronson, a sawmill town, and he took in a little money and a lot of practical experience. Nobody made waves about his not being duly licensed to practice dentistry - they were just glad to have somebody relieve their toothaches....They had had worse dental care.
Finally the great day dawned, Durward I. Trotti, DDS, fresh out of dental college, with dental equipment 'on a credit' set up shop upstairs over the old Orton building in Jasper. It was 1929, not exactly your banner year for budding young dentists. It was on October 29 of that year that Wall Street crashed, and little old Jasper, Texas, was not long in feeling the consequences - that period so un-fondly remembered as the Great Depression. Extracting a tooth for $1.50 and filling one for $2.00 was not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme, and, when your patients had neither the dollar nor a "fo-bit-piece" either, the practice of dentistry was even less lucrative. Meanwhile, the bill collector for all that fancy dental equipment was standing around, and Durward, who is not your basic worrier, began to worry - just a little.

Widely known throughout southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana was an older dentist, Dr. T.R. Dickerson, who had offices in our neighboring town of Newton. Doctor Dickerson had hopes for the dental profession and for Durward, and he made arrangements with him for a move to Newton. At least he could save his dental equipment, and, so, one day in 1932, Durward's sister Hattie (Hattie Boynton Capps) drove him over to Newton to try again.......
First National Bank of Jasper wants you to have a good day, and join us again in the morning to learn how D. Trotti came out in the town of Newton ONCE UPON A TIME.

ONCE UPON A TIME - Nida Marshall - Author and interviewer of ONCE UPON A TIME stories on KTXJ Radio in Jasper, Texas
First National Bank - KTXJ
Friday, September 29, 1978
ONCE UPON A TIME a young dentist in Newton, Durward I. Trotti, in practice with Dr. T.R. Dickerson, deep in the throes of the Great Depression, became a circuit rider of sorts in the tooth business.

He had worked his way through dental college, began practice in that fateful year of 1929, and the going was rough. If you had a dollar and a half, you could get your tooth pulled; if you had $2.00, that was good enough for a filling; if you didn't have any money and were suffering, which, more times than not was the case, Doctor Dickerson or Doctor Trotti probably would relieve your pain for you anyway, thereby relieving their consciences, but doing little for the coffers.

If the trade couldn't come to you, you had to go where the trade was, so Durward was sent to Wiergate on Wednesdays and Pineland on Saturdays and Sundays with portable dental equipment. Fortunately, the sawmills were still in operation.. The mill hands didn't make much money; on the other hand, young Dr. Trotti wasn't charging very much! The barter system, so popular during the Depression Days, and Durward's young bride, pretty Honor B Handley of Lake Charles, who had come to Newton as a grammar school teacher for a couple of years, planned many a meal around sundry produce in payment for services rendered - potatoes, chickens, eggs, bacon and ham...

There seemed not end to the bad times. Their offices on the square burned in 1934, and the dentist moved upstairs over the Bean building. The Depression was not through with East Texas yet, and, in 938, Doctor Trotti made another touch decision. A country boy himself, he loved these country folks at Newton and Jasper, but he had a family now, and common sense and well-meaning friends and relatives told him to make a move to a more lucrative location where e would find more young folks and make a better life for himself and his family. If ever he was going to make the break, now was the time. So he bargained for new dental equipment and rented office space from the Beall Brothers in Nacogdoches. But, just before the Trotti family's departure, another major decision was thrust upon him. Doctor Dickerson died suddenly, and here was Newton without a dentist.

The rest of the story is well known in these parts.....
The Trotti's never left Newton....Now, in his 50th year of the practice of dentistry, Durward Trotti has spent the major portion of his life in service to mankind, not only through his profession, but in the civic and spiritual activities of his town, and as a devoted husband and father to his family. (Their daughters, Sara Jones and her attorney-husband live in Dallas, and Kathryn Ann Durdin, who is married to Col. Tommie Durdin, formerly of Jasper, is in Weisbaden, Germany. There are three grandchildren.)
Newton never had a more avid booster. He has served on the city council; he was a member of the first volunteer fire department; he has been on the Board of Stewards of the First Methodist church for years. Twice president, he is the only charter member still active in the Newton Lions club, having already received his 40 year service award. He is a director and past president of the Sabine-Neches Dental Society. And on and on .....

But Doctor Trotti is not 'yes' man. Described by a friend as a very fair but 'feisty' fellow, "involved in more than one controversial issue in the service of his town, you might not always agree with Durward Trotti, but you know you have come up against a man who has the courage of his convictions."

The war years were hard years for doctors and dentists, and, afterward, he many times tried to interest younger dentists in the good country life. But when they drove into Newton, they decided on the bright lights of New Orleans or Houston or Big D, so Doctor Trotti plodded on at his own careful pace...

Modern dentists took on heavier patient loads, but Doctor Trotti never want in much for those new fangled time and motion studies....

Well you don't have to climb any creaky old wooden stairs anymore to get to his office, and he finally did find somebody who does appreciate the country life, Frank and Jody wood, who share offices in the red brick building just off the town square.

The years have rested lightly on Dr. Trotti's brow. He easily passes for a dozen years his junior. Now in semi-retirement, always an outdoorsman, he finds more time now for stalking fox squirrels and bagging a few doves, and he's even been know to snag a white perch or two!

This was Durward Trotti's birthday week = September 27, 1906. We hope it was a happy one, Durward. The story of your life is a happy one and a good one, and it ought to gladden your heart that so many folks have called into First National this week to tell us so!

FIRST NATIONAL BANK of JASPER wants you to have a good weekend and join us again Monday morning to hear the story of how a member of the wealthiest family in American came to live in Jasper ONCE UPON A TIME..... (Transcribed by Dr. Trotti's Grand Daughter - DM)(7-13-2021)(ONCE UPON A TIME - Nida Aden (Marshall), FIRST NATIONAL BANK - KTXJ - September 27-29 1978) Source: Texas Genealogy Trails website