Charles Strub was born in Hollister , California , as the only child of Isadore Strub and Rebecca Williamson Strub . At a young age , he moved to San Francisco , where he attended St Ignatius High School . He enrolled at Santa Clara University and played baseball under future business partner Charlie Graham . He was a teammate of future New York Yankees star Hal Chase . Having been put through agony as a child by the dentists of the day , he decided to study dentistry . Since Santa Clara did n't offer a dentistry program , he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley to obtain his degree and where he also played on the varsity baseball team . At Berkeley , he studied modern techniques with new pain-killing drugs and laughing gas so that pulling an abscessed tooth could be done painlessly — a great benefit to society , he thought . Upon graduation , Charlie invested in state-of-the-art equipment which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake before he saw his first patient . In the weeks following the disaster , he saw a column in the newspaper that said his baseball coach from Santa Clara , Charlie Graham , was looking for him to play some ball . During 1906 and 1907 he played baseball with the San Francisco team in the California State League but made his living as a dentist . Entrepreneurial focused , he was known as the " advertising dentist " and eventually had a chain of six " painless extraction " dentist parlors . His chain of dentist offices provided him the opportunity to speculate in the burgeoning California real estate market , financing much of the rebuilding of the SF Business district after the earthquake , making Doc Strub a very wealthy man . One of the San Francisco buildings he built was 450 Sutter , which still houses medical professionals
1906 earthquake
1906 San Francisco earthquake
Charles H. Strub