LEWISTON — Twin City Dental Lab owner Mike Adkins loves dogs.  “They help keep me in business” he says with a smile.  “Not really, but we do have three or four people come in every week because their dog chewed up their dentures.

“From being run over by a snowblower, to a lobsterman sneezing and having them fly overboard, to somebody flushing them down the toilet — we’ve seen it all!” Adkins says of the reasons customers give why they need their false teeth replaced.

On the other hand, he adds, “I had somebody tell me theirs have lasted 40 years.”

Adkins learned the trade in the Air Force in the early ’70s.  He had been recruited to play football and thought he was going to be an air traffic controller. But, the Air Force had other plans,  and trained him to be a dental lab technician.

In 1984 he bought Twin City Dental Lab with a partner. By 1990, he became the lab’s sole owner. And  by 2004, the old space on the bottom floor of the Professional Building in downtown Lewiston no longer suited his needs.  “We were sick of eating our lunch in an old bank vault,” says his daughter Jessica Hilton who handles the business end of close-knit company. 

“We had an old-fashioned barn raising when we built this place,” says Adkins describing how employees and their families and friends got together and constructed their current building on Webster Street in Lewiston. “We are all like family here and we all share in the profits,” he says.

While the lab serves 140 dentists in eight states, customers do not have to go to a dentist to have a set of dentures made.  At 52, Adkins went back to school for three years to become licensed to fit dentures himself. 

Although the majority of smiles in the building are fake — made up of porcelain and acrylic — the ones on the faces of the employees are genuine.  They appear to enjoy what they do  and pass that attitude along to their customers.