Alumni Profile: The Peter and Donna Rick Family

Accepting a dinner invitation to the Spring Lake home of Peter and Donna Rick means joining an atmosphere that helps define the term “close-knit family.” Sitting around a long dining room table with the eight members of their immediate family, you quickly learn that the banter is non-stop, the laughter is contagious and the family stories are weighted heavily in favor of dentistry.

This is a family with five dentists – both parents and three of their four children –all trained by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. The dentistry lineup looks like this:

• Dr. Peter Rick, Sr. – Undergraduate studies at U-M followed by a DDS in 1989. He began practicing as an associate in the Grand Haven area along Lake Michigan for a year, then bought a practice of his own in 1990. He built and maintained Grand Haven Family Dentistry until retiring near the end of 2023.

• Dr. Donna Rick – After starting college at Central Michigan for two years, she transferred to the U-M dental school and earned her bachelor’s degree in Dental Hygiene in 1984. She returned to the dental school and completed her DDS in 1989. That same year she opened Fruitport Family Dentistry, where she continues to practice, just nine miles from Peter’s practice.

• Dr. Chelsea Klipfel – Attended U-M for undergraduate studies and earned her DDS in 2017. After graduating, for three years she alternated between her parents’ practices, before joining her mother’s practice full-time. She purchased the practice from her mother in 2021.

• Dr. Peter Rick, Jr. – Attended U-M for undergraduate and earned his DDS in 2020. He joined his father’s practice and purchased it in 2022.

• Dr. Keon Rick – Received undergrad degree from Hope College in Holland, Mich., then earned his DDS from U-M in 2024. He practices at Hackley Community Care, a comprehensive community clinic offering a variety of healthcare services at several locations in Muskegon County. He is also an associate at a private practice one day a week.

The Ricks’ other child, Noah, considered dentistry but opted to earn two undergraduate degrees from U-M – one in mechanical engineering and the other in art and design. After several years of working in the boat manufacturing industry, he is now working on his MBA degree from Indiana University. “Our joke in this house,” Donna said, “is that we have five tooth engineers and one mechanical engineer.” Or as Chelsea puts it in regard to Noah: “Five dentists and one who is way smarter.”

Collectively, the six Ricks have had 38 years of educational experience at the University of Michigan.

The family bond with dentistry also extends back to Peter Sr.’s late mother, Iris Rick, who earned her Dental Hygiene certificate from the U-M dental school in 1949. She worked as a hygienist in Saginaw for several decades, helping found the Saginaw Valley DH association and retaining her DH license for 64 years.

Even the spouses of the Ricks’ two children who are married have dentistry connections. Peter Jr.’s wife Liz worked as an assistant at Donna’s practice for several years before her career switched to audiology. The family of Chelsea’s husband, Doug Klipfel, included his great uncle, the late Dr. Richard Charlick, who earned his DDS at U-M in 1959 and taught at the dental school for 25 years while practicing in nearby Brighton, Michigan, for 57 years.

So when all eight family members sit around the dining room table, which is often, or when they go to the family cottage Up North, also a frequent occurrence, stories involving dentistry and the family dental practices are never far from the conversation. While other U-M dental school alumni families may have more dentists if uncles, aunts and distant cousins are counted over several generations, the Ricks must be one of the few U-M families with five dentists in just two successive generations.

Origin stories

As the patriarch of this string of family dentists, Peter Sr. says his interest in the profession dates to his childhood dentist in Saginaw. Dr. George Williams, (U-M DDS 1949) would always greet Peter with variations of the same theme: “Peter, you are my favorite patient. I am so glad you came in. You are just a great kid, you are just my favorite patient.” Peter heard that line a lot because from the time he was 4 or 5 he had a lot of cavities and, thus, a lot of visits to Dr. Williams. “I loved to see him. I really thought I was his favorite patient. We went to the same church and he was always very positive. He was not the old 1940s dentist who would say, ‘Shut up, kid, and sit down and open your mouth.’ He was always very uplifting.”

Based on those friendly encounters, Peter recalls wanting to be a dentist as early as age 5. Dr. Williams was helpful and supportive as Peter grew up and asked questions about dentistry and dental school. Fast forward to Peter’s third year of dental school after he had gained experience in the school’s pediatric clinic and realized dentists need a way to make kids unafraid of the dentist. It had been several years since he had talked to Dr. Williams, so Peter decided to call him with an update.

“I said, ‘Dr. Williams, I’m a third-year dental student now. I’m getting married this summer. And I’m mad as hell at you.’ And you could just hear the air leave him. And he asked why. And I said, ‘For 24 years, I thought I was your favorite patient. But now I realize you told that to every damn kid there was.’ And he belly-laughed like you wouldn’t believe.” Kindness had created a dentist.

For Donna, who grew up in Manistee, Michigan, dental hygiene was presented as a career option in a science class her senior year of high school. A hygienist advised: “If you’d like to be in the medical field and you are looking at raising a family and making a decent living and having great hours and helping people, then this would be a great profession for you to consider.” It sounded like a good option, but Donna had always hated dental appointments, so instead she investigated medical technology, an emerging career that was popular with several of her friends at CMU.

“But the first day I looked under a microscope, I couldn’t do it. And I said, oh no, I need another profession,” she recalls. The first alternative she thought of was dental hygiene, despite being among those who disliked going to the dentist. “I said, OK, I’m going to go into that profession and I’m going to prove to people that it doesn’t have to be that bad.”

After transferring to U-M, part of her financial aid package for her two years of DH was the opportunity to work for various faculty members in their research labs. Their encouragement not only helped her through the dental hygiene program, but they also bolstered her confidence by urging her to continue on to obtain her DDS. She was accepted into dental school while still a DH student with the proviso that she must first ace a couple of prerequisite courses that could be taken at the local community college. While she took those courses over the next year, she also worked as a hygienist at the Ann Arbor dental offices of various faculty she had met at the dental school. That experience in dental practices and the connections she had made with faculty while a DH student helped make for a smooth transition into and during dental school.

Peter and Donna started dating in the fall of their first year in dental school and were married between their junior and senior years, one of several classmate-couples who were married in the Class of 1989. Their dating and marriage meant that they basically spent their four years of dental school studying together. When graduation arrived, they knew they wanted to head to the western shore of Michigan. They chose opportunities in the coastal population center comprised of Grand Haven, Spring Lake, Fruitport and Muskegon. They set up individual general dentistry practices and located their home in the middle between Peter’s practice in Grand Haven and Donna’s in Fruitport.

Children extend the family profession

Long before the next generation of Ricks decided on dentistry and earned their DDS degrees (or mechanical engineering in Noah’s case), all four children were being immersed in dentistry by frequently visiting their parents’ offices. And it started at an early age. Donna remembers the graciousness of her patients when she would bring baby Chelsea to the office. Once the baby’s nap was over and the hungry cries started, Donna recalls her patients saying, “‘Hey, your kid’s crying, go take care of her. I’ll wait for you.’ And they would.”

As the children grew up, they took on various helper duties in both offices, including basic housekeeping and clean-up tasks, regularlyscheduled water line cleanings, staffing the front desk, mouthguard clinics, and eventually assuming the role of dental assistants.

All the while, Peter Sr. says his career message to his children was, “Don’t do what Mom and Dad do. Do what you want to do.” As the oldest child, Chelsea was the first to decide on whether to follow her parents and she echoes their open-ended encouragement.

“They always told us not to go into dentistry just because they were dentists. They told us to go find our own path.”

For Chelsea, dentistry just made sense. “I was always at their offices – helping, working, experiencing dentistry,” she said. “I wanted to be in a medical field. I did all the science projects in school. I had wanted to be an emergency room doctor, but then I realized that in dentistry you have a unique relationship with patients that you don’t get in medicine. If you have to go to the ER you don’t know your physician. Or in primary care, you go to the doctor mostly because you are sick or it is maybe just once a year. In dentistry, you become a part of somebody’s life and see them twice a year, or more, and not just when they are sick. You are watching them go through life and become a family. It is just a really interesting way to be a part of the community and still be in a medicalrelated field.”

And then, she adds, there was that other crucial family advantage: “I had a job lined up after dental school, so that made the decision a little easier.”

Peter Jr. said he, too, considered medicine and dentistry, with dentistry winning out for various reasons. “I love working with my hands,” he said. “I love the social aspects and talking to people. It’s fun to get to know people. I didn’t want to work for some hospital or a company. I wanted to work for myself and build things with my own hands and do the engineering aspects of dentistry.”

The siblings remember how much they liked listening to their parents talk about dentistry when they arrived home at the end of the day. Often the kids would sit around a table and listen as their Mom and Dad debriefed each other about various cases, successes and problems they encountered with their patients that day. The caring way their parents talked about their patients left an impression. As did the phone calls their Dad made to patients each night to check on how they were feeling after that day’s particular procedure.

“It was cool because you had your parents home for dinner all the time,” Peter Jr. remembers. “They would talk about they had a great case that day. It was kind of cool to see that they would take work home with them, but at the same time they didn’t have to take work home with them.”

As the youngest sibling, Keon took note of the discussions about careers that his sister and brothers had gone through. He considered biomedical engineering and the idea of a medical field, perhaps something in the prosthetics area. Noah was by then well into his mechanical engineering studies and shared with Keon what was involved in that field, things like computer-based software and other CAD-CAM technologies. “I hate sitting at a computer,” Keon said, “so that stopped the engineering idea real quick.”

As Keon considered his career options, he continued to assist in his dad’s office. One day a local orthodontist, joking to Peter that no kid likes to work for his dad, invited Keon to assist in the orthodontics office. To Peter’s surprise, the next day Keon took up the offer and spent several summers experiencing dentistry from an orthodontist’s point of view. That outside-the-family experience helped Keon confirm that dentistry was the way he wanted to go.

“Ultimately, I liked dental because it was in my mind a true healthcare,” he said. “We see patients when they are healthy and try to keep them healthy. We give them tips and help even when they are healthy. I felt like medicine is more of sick care and I didn’t really want to do that for my entire career. I wanted to see people who were always trying to be healthy and try to get them to that point, and try to maintain them at that point.”

Following your parents: pros and cons

The three dentists in the second generation say there are mostly positives to following your parents into the profession. It is an easy and comfortable consult to be able to ask around-the-clock for parental advice or assistance with patient cases. The down side mostly involves longtime patients adjusting to kids who grow up.

“When I first started working after graduating, I would introduce myself by saying, ‘Hello, I’m Dr. Klipfel.’ And so many people would say, ‘Oh, I held you when you were a baby.’ They knew me since I was a kid, or babysat me, and they would say, ‘I can’t take you seriously as a doctor. I’ve known you your whole life.’ Or they would joke that I was 13 but I would tell them I turned 14 yesterday. Or they would ask me if I had ever done this procedure before. And I’d tell them, ‘third one today.’ I’m getting less of that now that I’m eight years into it.”

Peter Jr. said working with his dad brought them closer together. “Chelsea predicted we would kill each other within the first month we worked together,” he remembers. “One day, we rode bikes together over to Chelsea’s house and she was shocked. She said, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’ve become best friends!’”

“We used to butt heads a lot when I was growing up,” Peter Jr. said. “When I got into the office, it was sort of cool because he got to learn about some of the stresses in my life, and why I acted the way I did. And I got to learn about some of the stresses that he took home with him that I never really realized. As a kid, when I might have wondered why he didn’t get to one of my games or swim meets, I didn’t realize that maybe it was 4:15 in the afternoon and one of his patients came into the office in pain. And you can’t just run out the door and leave the patient. I know that now.”

Keon says his first job since graduating last year – at the Hackley community clinic –has been a satisfying experience. “I didn’t want to mix family and business. Being at Hackley helps me serve a different population that is quite in need. I really enjoy getting the patients to a healthy place and helping them understand how to keep their health.” He takes the same supportive approach to patients at the private practice where he also works one day a week.

Like his siblings, Keon knows their parents have seen such a wide range of dental problems. “I still call them sometimes when I have questions,” he said. “I know they have had so much experience in the field. The more you do it, the more comfortable you are. But when you are first out of dental school, you are always trying to make sure that you are doing it right, that you are doing the best care possible for the patient. So they are a really good resource.”

It’s all about the patients

Donna’s patients have become accustomed to an usual way she puts them at ease, by singing softly while she works. Perhaps her love of singing is related to her church background – she is a lay pastor who leads the Fruitport Community Church. But between the singing and her self-described “bad jokes,” she wants her patients to feel comfortable.

“Dentistry can be incredibly stressful and I think it’s up to the dentist to find a way to make your patient feel comfortable,” she said. “I tell patients all the time that I realize this isn’t fun. Who likes getting a shot? If you liked these things, I’d be concerned about you. One patient told me: ‘I like it when you sing because I know you are in a good mood. If you aren’t singing, I’m worried you are in a bad mood. I don’t want you working on my teeth if you are in a bad mood.’”

Chelsea has picked up the singing tradition, though maybe not as often. “One of my very first patients, after I finished a filling, he sort of stunned me at first by saying, ‘Well, if you want my honest review, I’ll give you a rating of 3 stars out of 5. Everything is perfect but you didn’t sing and that’s the most important part, so you lost two stars. Your mom always sings.’ I said when I was a kid that I will never be like my Mom. And now we’re working in rooms next to each other and we start singing the song on the same line. Everyone says, ‘You are just like your mom.’”

Peter Sr. and Peter Jr. say they get compared a lot in their practice as well, but not because of singing, which is banned even when Chelsea is there to help out. Peter Jr. says one of the longtime staffers in the office, noting the similarities of father and son, modified the expression of “the apple didn’t fall far from the tree” to “the apple didn’t even roll when it came off the tree.” The Sr. and Jr. dentists use many of the same expressions in talking to patients and their strategy for relaxing patients is to talk about each step in the treatment process as they go along.

“Patients love to hear how we are progressing with their tooth,” says Peter Sr. “You give them almost like a play-by-play account. OK, we’ve got a little more decay to get out of here. And they ask does that mean we are getting close. They love to hear that feedback instead of just quietness.”

While the office atmosphere is important, Donna says the quality of the dentistry is obviously what matters most. “When I see someone who has fallen and broken their front tooth and they are mortified, I tell them: ‘The good news is we’re going to make it look better than it used to.’ And they are like, yeah, right. And then you fix it and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, that is amazing.’ When you can make someone that happy after such a traumatic experience, I think it goes back to my goal when I first started into dental hygiene and then into dentistry – I have tried my hardest to change the mindset of people who are deathly afraid of dentists. And you know you’ve succeeded when the patients can laugh and joke instead of being worried about being in the dental chair.”

Peter Sr. still recalls an experience many years ago with a longtime patient who seemed to be upset about something. “I could just tell that something was troubling her,” he remembers. “We were going to do a filling. We got ready to numb her and I said, what’s going on? And she started crying. Her kids were being bullied in school. We talked for an hour. I never picked up an instrument. I gave her some ideas of things she could do about it. And we had to reschedule her appointment because we spent the time just talking. It was one of those fulfilling moments. I don’t remember any filling I did in 1992, but I’ll never forget that conversation. That was nothing to do with dentistry. It was about the care for the patient.”

The way Peter Sr. and Donna have focused on their patients as they built their practices, often making lifelong friends in the process, is a model for their children. “The amount of people they have impacted and the amount of relationships they’ve built is impressive,” says Peter Jr. “My dad’s been to so many funerals of his former patients to support the families, which they appreciate. Our parents didn’t treat dentistry just as a business. They treat it as a family of people who they were there to support.”

Chelsea feigns aggravation, but it is actually admiration, when she mentions a practical problem of her parents being so connected to so many people in the community. “We learned early never to go to the grocery store with them,” she says. “Good Lord, you would be there ’til the sun went down. In every aisle, everywhere we go, they know someone who wants to stop and talk.”

Peter and Donna agree that performing dentistry and caring for patients are the easy parts of their careers, while being the boss of the business has always been the most difficult part. But the rewards outweigh the problems, they say, which is why they were happy to see three of their four children decide to carry on the family tradition.

“When you think of everything you’ve done to try to get your practice to where it is at, and to form these relationships with the people who are your patients,” Donna muses, “to pass it off to someone who doesn’t genuinely care about those people, would just break my heart. We used to get letters all the time from corporate dentistry trying to buy us out. When our kids said they wanted to go into dentistry, in our hearts we were leaping for joy.”

Joy was also in the air a few weeks ago with the addition of a new family member. On April 8, Peter Jr. and his wife Liz welcomed a new baby, Sadie Anne Rick. The parental and grandparental advice she receives some day will surely be the same as it was for her parents’ generation – some variation of: “Don’t go into dentistry just because nearly everyone in the family is a dentist. Find your own path.”

Maybe Sadie will go her own way like Uncle Noah. Or maybe, just maybe, dentistry is in her genes like most everyone else in the family. No matter how it turns out, it will be yet another great Rick Family story around the dinner table.