Close Up
A dental career with strings attached
Although he keeps a busy schedule at UB and in his private practice in Springville, Joseph Rumfola still keeps his hand in yo-yoing. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI
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“There were people who actually wanted me to do yo-yo instead of going on to dental school. I opted for the more stable career.”
When Joseph Rumfola was 10, he was introduced to something that would fill his life with countless ups and downs, or downs and ups. He was given his first wooden yo-yo, with a book of 10 tricks that he soon mastered. It eventually became his world on a string as he turned yo-yo professional, performing hundreds of tricks before audiences from New York City to Nuremberg, Germany, as he worked his way through Cornell.
“There were people who actually wanted me to do yo-yo instead of going on to dental school,” Rumfola recalls. “I opted for the more stable career.”
An interest in biology led to Rumfola’s decision to pursue dentistry. Soon after graduating from the UB School of Dental Medicine in 2002, he established his own general practice in his native Springville and returned to UB to become a clinical instructor in restorative dentistry.
He is now associate director of the Advanced Education in General Dentistry program, a comprehensive, one-year residency that he describes as “a stepping stone to private practice.” Rumfola supervises the program’s residents, making sure they are receiving a well-rounded education. He also is a lecturer for several courses and is involved in a lab study testing experimental cavity-filling materials. He crams all this into two days a week.
“Teaching was something I’ve always enjoyed and a way to give back to the profession as well,” he says. A drummer since third grade, Rumfola’s passion for teaching began when he started giving music lessons in high school. He subsequently became a teaching assistant at Cornell and UB. And there was always the yo-yo proficiency, which he also taught. “I briefly considered doing pediatric dentistry because of all the experience I had working with kids,” he says.
His talent with the yo-yo was encouraged by a boyfriend of his aunt, who had started a business in Arcade carving wooden carousel horses and using his scrap wood to make yo-yos. That turned into the Hummingbird Toy Company, which became internationally known for its yo-yos in the late 1980s. Young Joe began hanging out with professional demonstrators at the factory. He got to meet Tom, the yo-yoing half of the Smothers Brothers, when the company designed a yo-yo in his name. And the youngster participated in a number of yo-yo contests.
In his sophomore year at Cornell, the yo-yo career really started to take off. “For the next three years during every break or weekend, I would be traveling to toy and gift shows, or doing promotions, running yo-yo contests, doing summer camps, performing at baseball stadiums. I was paid $100 a day, plus travel expenses. I’ve been to practically every convention center or fairgrounds in most major cities in the U.S, and for 10 days at the largest toy fair in the world in Nuremberg,” Rumfola says.
He also worked closely with Tom Kuhn, a San Francisco dentist who patented a variety of different yo-yos beginning in the late 1970s. Rumfola acquired his unique ball-bearing yo-yo made of aircraft aluminum.
And there was some yo-yo ingenuity. “I had to do a certain number of service hours to get one of the scholarships in college, so I came up with the idea of doing an educational yo-yo program and offered it to all of the libraries in Western New York,” he says. “I probably have been in every library in the area.”
Once he started dental school, Rumfola found little time for yo-yoing. There was one more Toy Fair and then the curriculum took over. After dental school, he was invited to perform at the Smithsonian Institution in an exhibit honoring modern toy innovators like Kuhn. “Tom was a decent yo-yo player, but they wanted somebody better so I went down and yo-yoed at the Smithsonian a couple of years after dental school.”
Although his schedule is packed, Rumfola still keeps his hand on the yo-yo. He wowed the crowd at the dental school’s annual talent show earlier this year, a venue where he hasn’t performed since his student days. He can perform tricks with two yo-yos simultaneously, a yo-yo in one hand while juggling with the other, or yo-yoing and playing paddleball at the same time.
Rumfola has a successful practice in his hometown, busy six days a week with patients from across the South Towns. He has been married for 13 years to his high school sweetheart, Jennifer, who earned her graduate degree in speech language pathology from UB. They have two daughters, Maria, 5, and Natalie, 1-1/2.
Turns out Dad’s yo-yo prowess has a dental incentive. “When I went into my daughter’s kindergarten class to talk about dental health, I told the class if they pay attention and answer my questions the right way and prove that they’ve learned something, I’ll finish early and then show them yo-yo tricks,” he says. “That works well. I’d be surprised if I wouldn’t be performing more for the kids.”
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