After more than 30 years serving the region through his dentistry practice at Monadnock Community Hospital, Dr. Peter Cerroni has retired.
“It hasn’t just been drilling and filling, it’s being allowed into other people’s lives, and that’s very enriching. It’s the best part of dentistry,” he said.
Cerroni sold his practice at the Peterborough hospital to Jay and Steph Raynor in Sept. of 2016, and has been working for them two days a week for the last two years. Two weeks ago, he officially retired.
“When one of our primary care patients had an urgent dental need, it meant so much to have a dentist we could call on for help, MCH CEO Cyndee McGuire said. “Peter goes the extra mile because he is a special person and he cares so much for his patients.”
On Thursday, Monadnock Community Hospital plans to hold an open house in honor of Cerroni from 4 to 6 p.m. in Conference Room 5.
For the past 26 years, Cerroni, of Dublin, has worked as a dentist out of the Medical Arts building at the Monadnock Community Hospital. Before that, he ran his practice on Grove Street for another five.
Cerroni, a native of New York, said his road to being a small-town dentist isn’t a straight one – it’s full of small coincidences, any one of which might have put him on a different path.
For one thing, he said, when he got his degree in 1976, he dual majored in biology and photojournalism and never really intended to use his science degree, and hadn’t considered dentistry.
“I was a devout photojournalist,” Cerroni recalled. “I wanted to work for a top magazine.”
He would spend the next decade working as a photographer for a number of newspapers, starting with his home-town paper, the Watertown Daily Times, where he was first a copyboy and then a photographer.
Next, he worked the night beat for a Puerto Rican newspaper in the South Bronx, where he drove around during the nighttime hours with a police scanner or riding along with plainclothes officers.
“They tried to scare the hell out of me,” Cerroni said. “It was like ‘Kojak’, it was crazy.”
He only lasted at that job for a few months, Cerroni said, because he was more interested in human interest stories, and left for a weekly paper, and then to a start-up daily paper in New York City, where he ran the photolab until the paper went under.
He spent a year on a cruise ship as their daily newspaper editor, where he traveled to countries all over the world.
His final journalism job was at the big name magazine he’d always hoped for – a photoprinter job at Newsweek.
“I enjoyed myself there, but one day, we got news over the teletype that a jet had crashed in New Orleans, and all 149 people onboard died. An editor looked at it and sort of callously said, ‘This really ruins my evening,’ because it was a Friday afternoon. I went home to my wife, and said, ‘I’m just not sure I want to do this the rest of my life.’”
That was in 1981. As he was having these doubts, Cerroni said, he went to the dentist to get a broken tooth fixed. His dentist was an amateur photographer himself, and was interested in Cerroni’s career. When Cerroni mentioned he was considering looking into a different line of work, and dentistry was suggested to him. Cerroni was skeptical at first, because despite his biology degree, he had struggled in some of his science classes, such as chemistry.
“My dentist asked, ‘Do you tinker? Do you know how to fix a toaster oven?’ And I told him, in fact, I do. He said, ‘Then you’d be a good dentist.’”
On that chance recommendation, Cerroni went to night school to re-take some of his science courses, and then attended the Boston University School of Graduate Dentistry, and graduated in 1985. What took him from Boston to Peterborough was another chance encounter. On the streets of Boston, his wife had a conversation with a stranger who was looking for directions to her hotel. The woman mentioned her husband was a dentist in Peterborough, New Hampshire, who was looking to retire soon. His wife forgot the woman’s name, but Cerroni took a chance, and looked up all the dentists in Peterborough, and sent them letters and made phone calls to their offices.
While he didn’t find the man he was originally looking for (though he would later discover it was Peterborough dentist Bob Weathers) he was offered a job by another Peterborough practice, run by Dave Hedstrom and Paul Jane. He started commuting one day a week from Boston, and moved to Dublin in 1986, when he began to work for them full-time. He opened his own practice on Grove Street on May 13, 1988, where he stayed until he moved to the Monadnock Community Hospital in 1993.
Cerroni said that long relationship with some people and families is his favorite part of the job. “I have patients who have sent me their children, and I have a few families who I was on the third generation,” Cerroni said. “I always said, I hope I’m not in the business long enough to see the fourth generation – that would be too old.”