MILFORD – Marilyn Kenison remember her husband’s first patient. The couple had just opened his practice, and an elderly woman with a bad tooth walked from her home on Merrimack Road to the office of Dr. John Kenison on Amherst Street.

The newly-minted dentist and his wife had not even finished setting up.

“We had to really hustle” and sterilize the equipment, said Marilyn. Dr. Kenison charged the woman five dollars and Marilyn drove her home.

“I probably went to the bank with the money,” she said. “Those were lean years.”

That was the summer of 1962. After 55 years of working on the teeth of innumerable local residents, last week the Kenisons said goodbye to staff and patients, and people are remembering them as kind and caring community members and employers.

All the women in his office staff have worked for him decades, including Dianne McPherson, who is still here after 33 years. It’s the only job she has ever had, and she started tearing up as she remembered that Dr. Kenison came to her graduation.

In the early 1980s three office assistants were pregnant at the same time, so the Kenisons set up a nursery downstairs and Marilyn remembers they would take turns nursing their babies.

“To this day we are all friends,” said Karen Bedell, an account manager and receptionist for 41 years who now works one day a week. “It’s been the best job ever,” she said.

And Kenison’s reach extended out to those who couldn’t afford dental care.

Christine Janson, executive director of SHARE Outreach, the community charity organization, said that over the years, they “helped many, many SHARE clients, often for emergencies.

“A call to Dr. Kenison’s office was always like a call to family,” she said. “The office staff was caring and patient with us, whatever crisis our client was experiencing. We are forever grateful for all he has done for our clients who really had nowhere else to turn for dental help. His work as a community partner will be greatly missed.”

Tammy Scott, Milford Transfer Station manager, said Kenison helped one of her long-time volunteers who couldn’t afford dental treatment.

“We are going to miss that man,” she said, along with his wife.

Marilyn was an active town volunteer for many years, serving as selectman and spearheading the downtown revitalization in the 1990s. She was a founder of the Milford Pumpkin Festival and part of the Town Hall Auditorium Restoration Committee, which used festival proceeds to help pay off the cost of extensive renovations.

Dr. Kenison is 83 and had been easing off over the past four years as three new dentists, Drs. Sreemali Vasantha and Sujatha Anjaneyulu and Sukhder Singh, took over. The practice is now called Souhegan Valley Dental.

The Kenisons are settling down in their newly built house on Cunningham Pond in Peterborough, but Marilyn said Milford will always feel like home.