Sylvia Verdery Ransone’s husband Philip likes to joke that a dental hygienist is the best job for a woman because they get to talk to a captive audience all day.

Sylvia said there’s some truth to that. The Gloucester Point resident believes that the people who care enough for their teeth to come in are the nicest on the planet and looks forward to getting to know each and every one of them.

She’s has been a dental hygienist for 61 years. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania she attended a Public Health Fellowship at Columbia University in New York.

In New York, she was able to work for a dentist in Bronxville. There she cleaned the teeth of a lot of characters. Sylvia said the dentist would tell her after her patients left that they were Broadway actors or singers or other people of renown. That was every week for her.

Sylvia and her husband moved to Gloucester County in 1965, joining the dental practice of Tom Luckam the following year. Since then, she’s h...