It wasn't something her dentist had done. It was something he had said.

After 45 years on Ridge Avenue in Upper Roxborough, and hundreds of thousands of neighborhood teeth, Dr. Stanley Goldberg has had his fill.

He's closing his office, where his wife, Sandy, works as the receptionist and their dog, Buddy, works as the therapist, easing the tension that's inevitable when a kindly man goes to work on your mouth with heavy machinery.

Goldberg has an agreement of sale on the brick twin on whose upper floors he and Sandy reared two children and in whose converted garage he built a solo practice that paid to send those kids to Penn and Rice.

But no one has stepped forward to buy the business or the equipment. There's not much demand for a wood-paneled relic where time is kept by a giant white tooth clock his daughter made in middle school shop.

"I'm a dinosaur," said Goldberg, a soft-spoken man in a crisp, zippered shirt.

Today's dental-school graduates carry too much debt to buy a solo practice, he said. Insurance companies have cut the margins.

"It used to be if you did good work, you'd make the money," the 76-year-old dentist said. "Now you need to make the money first."

And Goldberg's always enjoyed taking his time - getting to know his patients, seeing each one of his children's school plays. It meant he often worked until 10 at night back when he was working for tuition money.

He loved it all. "We were happy because we liked the people we had," his wife said.

"And we got rid of the other ones," he added, with a chuckle.

He's spent more than half a century asking people to open a little wider, starting at Temple's dental school, then while a captain in the Air Force for three years in France, and finally in his converted garage, across the street from the Ivy Ridge shopping center.

Not much has changed inside his office, with its small waiting room and two spotless operatories. All records are kept by hand. There's only one phone line; "I can only talk to one person at a time," Sandy explains. The Formica counters and the metal cabinets are vintage 1964.

"Everything works perfectly in here," Goldberg said. "The only thing that doesn't is me."

George Dinicola, 60, would disagree. Dinicola, now a security guard at Cathedral Village, hadn't been to the dentist in five years when he first walked through the doors in 1974. His last dentist had been a frightening, hunched-over, thickly bespectacled man who loved to pull teeth.

"There was just something about this guy," Dinicola said of Goldberg. "He's a very kind man. He explains things, shows you stuff. We'd start talking about the Phillies or the Eagles, and the next thing I knew I was out the door. I was always comfortable there."

Goldberg calls that being "good at the chair."

Over the years he's had different receptionists and hygienists, but a decade ago Sandy joined him in the practice. She's a retired elementary teacher in the Philadelphia schools.

To complete the family touch, she started bringing Ollie to work. He was a gentle German shepherd-ish mutt who sat under her desk each day. He's since been replaced by Buddy, another rescue.

Buddy's a little more skittish. Patients wind up trying to ease his apprehension. It takes the edge off the visit.

"You just don't have people like this anymore," said Rosemarie Fuges. The retired accountant stood misty-eyed next to her sister, Mary Ann Panzer. Both had come for their last cleanings.

"We've been very spoiled," Fuges said. "All the good people seem to go away, all the good things."

The doorbell rang, and at the sight of the mailman in the window, Buddy started barking excitedly and rushed the door.

The mailman tossed the dog a cookie, buying enough time to hand the Goldbergs their mail. "Good catch," he said, moving on.

"Buddy's losing his job, too," Goldberg said. "He just doesn't know it yet."