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"Dr. Herbert Ross Reaver was the soul of graciousness as he welcomed visitors to his well-appointed home in Pisgah, a small suburb just off the beltway east of Cincinnati. Casually dressed in a western shirt and bolo tie, his mental energy belied his age.
Slight of build, hair thinning, with his once jet-black mustache now gray, his eyes sparkled and he was quick to laugh, as he jokingly bantered back and forth between guests and his wife and life-long companion, Millie.
At 93, Dr. Reaver didn't make out-of-town jaunts anymore. Just getting around was sometimes a problem as evidenced by a seat mounted to the staircase railing and powered by an electric motor to help him up and down the stairs of his two-story home.
"Old age has caught up to me, so I can't travel anymore," he said by way of explaining a recent disappointment - declining an invitation from Dr. Sid E. Williams and Life University in Georgia.
The institution wanted him to attend the upcoming November 19, 1999 dedication of a bell tower honoring Dr. Reaver and his service to chiropractic. He apologized again for his inability to withstand the rigors of long distance travel as he settled back in his comfortable living room. Around him the walls were covered with plaques honoring his years of service to chiropractic. Antiques, floor to ceiling bookshelves, and an immense collection of albums and 78 rpm records - mostly jazz - filled the room.
Young Herb Reaver got his start in music in the early 1920s playing jazz guitar for a riverboat dance band that plied the small cities and towns along the Mississippi River. It was during a stop in Davenport, Iowa, that he met some chiropractic students from Palmer and decided that this young healing art - and not music - was the career for him.
That decision was the first step in a journey that would place him at the center of one of the greatest struggles the profession has ever experienced. It's hard to imagine this courtly gentleman as the passionate firebrand who was jailed more often than anyone else in the fight for chiropractic to exist as a legal profession.
It's also surprising that, after 71 years in chiropractic and hundreds of thousands of patients, that Dr. Reaver still wasn't ready to retire. His patients and his love of the profession wouldn't let him stop offering the chiropractic care to the neighbors and long-time patients who love him. The telephone was seldom quiet for very long. With its frequent rings bringing yet another request for an evening appointment.
Millie, who first met Dr. Reaver when she was a 13-year-old patient, recalled that every year he would ask her, "Can I have one more year?" "The last time he asked," she smiled, "I told him, 'You can have the rest of your life.'"
Millie admitted that sometimes he got tired and seemed to be slowing down, but then he disappeared downstairs to his adjusting room and soon she would hear laughter and lively voices as he returned renewed and reinvigorated from treating patients.
"One thing you've got to realize, when you marry a chiropractor, chiropractic is going to be the most important thing in your life," said Millie, who credited her own life and good health to his adjusting skills. She was obviously quite proud of her husband and quick to tell stories about him, always beginning them with, "You know he won't tell you about this…"
Reading the volumes of newspaper clippings and letters from that era revealed a man who saw chiropractic as worth the fight. To the very end it continued to be a powerful and vitalizing force in his life.
Her husband was the most arrested and most jailed chiropractor in the profession's long and often bitter struggle for licensure. He was arrested 12 times and sent to prison four times in Cincinnati, Ohio for practicing without the permit issued by the state medical association.
"A sizeable portion of my life was spent behind prison walls because I practiced chiropractic," he said. "What was it like, you ask? We were hounded. We were treated like criminals. We were subjected to harassment, treachery, and trickery. Words come to me kind of slowly, but you ask what was it like? We were always being spied upon and arrested, tried and jailed." | 
