Echoes of Normandy landing resound 60 years later.

IT was 1979 and I was living in Honfleur, a picturesque town on the Normandy coast of France. I rented a room with a view for about $50 a month and spent the summer there.

I had meant to take a day trip to see the Invasion Beaches where Allied troops landed 35 years earlier. I didn't, though. Something else happened.

One afternoon I bit into a baguette and crack! That was the sound of a breaking tooth, the one that I had root-canalled just before I'd left Los Angeles the year before and failed to get crowned.

I'd noticed a brass plaque engraved with the name of a dentist posted on a wall in front of a house on the bottom of the hill. So I walked down and hoped I could get some help.

The dentist opened his door and I struggled to explain my situation. "English?" he asked. I speak English, I told him, but I'm an American.

His eyes widened and he smiled.

"An American, coming to my office," he said, astounded. "This is fantastic."

I didn't know how to respond.

"We must have a drink," he said, and broke out a bottle of Calvados, a potent apple brandy named for a district in the region. He poured two shot glasses.

OK, I thought, this is not going to be your typical trip to the dentist.

"To the United States," he toasted, clicking glasses with me. He poured another round. I kept trying to ask him about my tooth, but he had something more important to talk about.

"J'aime les Amiricains," he announced. "And I'm going to show you why."

He marched into his study and motioned for me to follow. At his desk, he showed me a coffee-table book titled "Eisenhower," featuring a large picture of the smiling general on the cover.

He opened the book to a page in the middle and showed me one of the photographs.

"See this?" he said. Ike was smiling and raising his glass at the center of a crowded banquet table. On the general's left was a Frenchman wearing a beret, wire-frame glasses and thin moustache, smiling wildly, joining the toast.

"My father," the dentist said. His old man had been a leader of the Resistance, and the celebration in the photo marked the success of the Liberation of Normandy.

"And that's why," he said, "J'aime les Americains. "

He sat for a moment, looking at the photograph, transported. Then he offered to tell me a secret.

"J'aime les Americains," he said, "but also, j'aime les Americaines" emphasizing the feminine form of the noun.

He opened a cabinet door. Taped to the inside was a montage of Farrah Fawcett-Majors bathing-suit pinups.

He took an impression of my tooth and fitted me with a crown about a week later. I think he charged me about $100, probably just enough to cover his lab expenses.

On a trip back to France in 1996, my family and I spent a week in Trouville, near Honfleur. One day we drove west, stopping in Bayeux for lunch and a walk through the museum displaying the famous 1066 tapestry, then to the Invasion Beaches, where I finally saw what I'd always wanted to see all those years: Point du Hoc, where U.S. Army Rangers and some of the Brits with whom they'd trained landed June 6, 1944, 60 years ago this week.

After they had disembarked on a narrow stretch of beach that was disappearing as the tide rose, they shot ropes attached to hooks up to the top of the 10-story cliff walls. Then they climbed up. German troops were throwing hand grenades and firing machine guns down at them, but had fled by the time the Allies got to the top.

And I saw the American Cemetery, where 9,387 U.S. troops are buried.

A couple of days later I went back to Honfleur. I looked for the dentist's plaque, but I didn't see it. I like to think he's still practicing somewhere, though, cleaning teeth, drinking Calvados, fantasizing about Angelina Jolie and remembering how his father earned his place in history.

Steve Silkin is newsdesk editor of the Business Journal.