COOS BAY — It didn’t take long for Dr. Weston Heringer to get his first “sunshine” case of the day. Madison fourth-grader Jakob Dunn came to him Wednesday morning with a bad baby tooth. It needed to come out.

With the help of his assistant, some anesthesia and the amenities of his traveling office, Heringer relieved Dunn of the incisor without so much as a whimper from the youngster.

“You did a great job,” Heringer said, patting the boy’s head.

About five minutes later, Dunn climbed out of the dentist’s chair and made the short trip back to his classroom. His treatment was made possible thanks to a traveling dentist office known as the Tooth Taxi.

The 38-foot van stopped at Madison Elementary School this week, where Heringer and six local dentists, Thomas Holt, Steven Richardson, Gerald Brouhard, Roger Sims, Sam Scott and Sixto Contreras, will examine about 100 Coos Bay students. The vehicle includes two dentist stations and is run by the Dental Foundation of Oregon. It has been driving around the state since last fall. The van is stopping primarily at schools with large populations of free- or reduced-lunch recipients, said program manager Mary Daly. Those are the schools where it is more likely students don’t have health insurance to cover dentist visits.

Dentists provide exams, cleanings, sealants, fillings and extractions (sunshine cases as Heringer likes to call them in front of children). He explains it’s a nice way of saying the sun while soon shine through the gap in their teeth.

Coos Bay dentist Holt joined Heringer in the van Wednesday morning. It was his first time volunteering, though he paid a visit to the Tooth Taxi on Tuesday. He recognized one of his first patients of the day.

“I saw you yesterday, dude,” he said with a grin, eliciting a smile from the youngster.

“People are excited to see this,” he continued.

He was pleased that there has been a lot of interest locally in helping out with the Tooth Taxi.

Daly agreed, noting that at other stops, she often has difficulty getting dentists to volunteer. The six local dentists are helping out for four-hour stretches.

“They can see cases they wouldn’t see in their offices,” she said. “They give to the community they live in.”

More than 100 students had been screened, Daly said, with about a third of them requiring immediate care of some sort. She noted that while a lot of the Madison students have seen a dentist before, not all of them were receiving regular care.

For Heringer, each stop offers a new challenge. The 64-year-old pediatric dentist was splitting time between private practice and teaching when the ODS asked him if he knew of any young dentists who would like to tackle the job.

“I thought, ‘That sounds like fun,’” he recalled.

He suggested himself.

The van is well equipped, with flat screen televisions above the dentist chairs providing a Scooby-Doo distraction Wednesday for nervous patients.

 But it’s the patients he gets to see that Heringer enjoys the most.

“Adults are always blaming something else for their problems,” he said. “Kids just tell you how it is.”