which may sound like the name of an English pub but was actually a dental class he was taking at the University of Pennsylvania. He was only twenty, but he was already a third-year dental student, having enrolled at Penn at the age of sixteen as part of a six-year dental program—two years of undergraduate work followed by four years of dental school.It surprised no one that Jay Edwards would go to dental school. His father, Jonas Edwards, was a smalltown dentist, practicing in Riverside, a mill town in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. The family lived one town over in Delanco, which sits on the Delaware River about thirteen miles north of Philadelphia. Jay was his parents’ third and last child, but their only son. His grandfather had been a physician, his father a dentist, so it only made sense that he follow in their footsteps in some way. “I grew up being very organized and very careful. It just seemed to be the right way to do things,” he said. “I’ve always described myself as a belt-and-suspenders guy.”Belt and suspenders in hand, he went off to Penn shortly after the end of World War II, having been skipped ahead twice in grade school, and found himself in classes with men many years older than he was.
