Dr. Herbert Ross Reaver - The Most Jailed Chiropractor Remembers The Days of Oppression

Dr. Herbert Ross Reaver

The Most Jailed Chiropractor

Chiropractic Pioneer

"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.

A Powerful, Vitalizing Force

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."

Even though traces of his experiences were now shrouded in the mists of passing time, the battles made a deep and lasting impression. He was not a criminal, but he was arrested and jailed with criminals of every sort.

"I guess I could say for those who have never experienced it, the arrest is something that is hard to understand," he said. "The sheer terror of the police pickup and the police lockup. The preliminary trial, which resulted in media insults, public humiliation and the private slights afterwards. It made a lasting psychological impact on one's family. Many old-time chiropractors experienced that trauma."

Reaver experienced his first arrest soon after setting up practice in Cincinnati following his graduation from Palmer School of Chiropractic in 1928. It soon developed into a continuing pattern. Officials from the state's medical board would arrive in town and the police would show up at his office to take the chiropractor into custody.

Newspapers of the time show a small, wiry, but very defiant, man being led out to a waiting police van between two burly officers of the law. After appearing in court and paying a fine, Reaver would return to his practice and begin seeing patients again.

"I just got fed up with the idea of paying tribute to somebody or some organization for doing what I thought was right," he recalled. "I took eight arrests and paid the fine. Then I decided I wasn't going to cooperate and let the authorities do with me what they will. So I just refused to pay a fine and refused to give bond. That put me in jail. "

He was jailed for nine days. The next time he was confined for 30 days. Then two months, and finally six months in the county prison.

"It was a matter of principle for all of us," he said. "We don't practice medicine in any shape or form. To be designated as limited medical practitioners was something that was intolerable for us. And of course it was a useless thing anyway because the so-called permit limited the types of cases we could handle. It was just something that any chiropractor with any guts could not accept."

There were quite a few chiropractors in the city at that time. Only a few operated with the permit, but only Dr. Reaver experienced repeated arrests and imprisonment. Fiery and outspoken, he burned with the belief that chiropractic was the secret to good health, and that traditional medicine had relatively little to offer.

He spoke often and wrote numerous newspaper columns challenging traditional medical practices such as mandatory vaccination.

"Many medical doctors were threatened because he had such a large practice," remarked Millie, who stood by him in those difficult days. She recalled that when Dr. Reaver was released from jail, patients and supporters would gather outside his office to cheer him on. A columnist for the local daily kept his plight in the public eye by hammering away at the issue on a regular basis.

"Every time I served my last day there would be a lot of people waiting for me outside my office," he said, "ready for me to take care of them." And Millie - ever loyal - took care of him and their young son and carried on the crusade when he was in jail by delivering petitions to the Governor's office and earning money when he couldn't practice.

You can see that once she was a beauty queen. Millie helped to keep them afloat by modeling for a local glamour photographer. She still has copies of the black and white photos of a very beautiful woman striking sultry poses.

"Prison is a cross-section of our society that no one can understand, unless they've experienced it," observed Dr. Reaver. "For a professional man, it's exceptionally hard. I know it was for me."

Even in jail, however, he never stopped being a Doctor of Chiropractic. Fellow prisoners as well as guards would ask for care and he would adjust them in his cell after fashioning a crude adjusting table from a bunk or bench.

"As a matter of fact, I took care of the captain of the guards," he recalled. "We later became good friends. So, you can say that I practiced my profession while I was in jail. I practiced in jail what I was being jailed for! It didn't stop me from wanting to help people."

His fight drew support from the profession as well. Many chiropractors were happy he was fighting for their rights and perhaps relieved that he was the one going to jail for them. In those days he was an active member of the International Chiropractor's Association and a frequent speaker at chiropractic meetings throughout the Midwest. He was a close friend of the great Dr. B.J. Palmer himself. The Developer of Chiropractic once paid his fine - despite his protests - to prevent him from going to jail again.

"At the time, I was just fighting for a cause," he remarked. "I wanted chiropractors to have their own licensing board like other professions. I thought we were entitled to it and nothing else would do. I withstood the torture because I believed what I was doing was right. If I hadn't had any support at all I still would have done it."

After his final jail term in 1950, Reaver was tired and in failing health. The stress of fighting the authorities and being dragged off to jail again and again had taken its toll.

"I was in pretty bad shape physically and financially," he admitted. "I decided to move to Florida, and that's probably when my harassment stopped."

Battling Prejudice He opened a new practice and a new chapter of his life in St. Petersburg, where he and Millie lived for 15 years. The warmth of the Florida sun and the more favorable political climate for chiropractic restored his spirits and his health. Soon he was back to full strength and building a growing practice. Always a trailblazer, he found new avenues for promoting chiropractic by providing care for the many professional baseball players who came south for spring training.

"I became known among the black players as a doctor who could help them," he said. "In a sense I was taking care of a lot of sports people way before there was such a thing as a sports doctor." He got his start in this groundbreaking practice when a popular local pitcher developed a nagging physical aliment that kept him out of the game.

"I met him at one of the games and asked why he wasn't playing anymore," Dr. Reaver recalled. "He explained his problem to me. I told him I thought I could help him. He came into the office the next day. That night he was able to play again, and that established my reputation as being able to help the athletes down there. From there my reputation spread."

Always a social progressive, Dr. Reaver not only provided chiropractic care to black baseball players, but he and Millie socialized with them. He also put his pen to work writing newspaper articles advocating fair treatment of minorities. Those views - publicly expressed in the conservative Southern climate of the1950s - quickly brewed hostility among local residents.

"The white supremacy groups and the Ku Klux Klan rode my tail like crazy," he said. "They tried to put me out of business. It culminated in lots of harassment and petty little things done to me and my property."

The petty harassment turned deadly serious one night when the Klan hired two thugs to attack him outside his office. Wielding baseball bats, the two beat him unconscious. As he lay on the ground bleeding, he recalls hearing one of the men say, "Let's go. He's dead."

"I fooled them. I didn't die," he said, recalling how he crawled far enough to get help. Later, when Millie arrived at the hospital, she found him still soaked in blood with numerous stitches in his head.

The doctors decided that Reaver needed a tetanus shot after suffering so many injuries. "But he refused and told them he didn't take drugs," said Millie. He ended up checking himself out of the hospital and going home.

Honored For Courageous Service Although the 15 years the couple spent in Florida were joyous ones, despite such incidents, they soon began to hanker for the more familiar sights and sounds of Ohio. "Many things prompted me to come back," he said. "Primarily, it's Millie's hometown and her family is here. All our friends are here. We love the place."

The couple spent 31 years in this same house, which they built soon after returning. It's home and always will be, they both said. The two were happy, but their lives were tinged with a certain sadness. Millie still choked up when she talked about their son, Chappy. A successful chiropractor and author, seemingly in the prime of health, he died suddenly a few years ago.

She opened up one of the fine cabinets in the living room and pulled out several books and letters. From among them she retrieved a page copied from a well-known mystery magazine. Written by the editor, who frequently published Chappy's stories, it described his own sorrow at learning of their son's premature death.

Over the years, Dr. Reaver has received many honors from his alma mater, Palmer, and from the ICA, which named him Chiropractor of the Year, but he seemed particularly pleased about this latest honor from Life. The University, at the direction of its Founder and President Dr. Williams, constructed a Chiropractic Memorial Bell Tower to honor Dr. Reaver and all the chiropractic pioneers - more than 700 in all - who were arrested or jailed for their profession.

Reaver was happy that younger generations are learning that the profession they enjoy today was not always so easy to practice.

"I certainly appreciate that Life University is building this memorial and that old-time chiropractors are being recognized for the suffering they went through to practice this profession of ours," he said. "I think it's marvelous that Life is doing this. And I particularly appreciate the honor that I'm getting as a result of this project."

He realized that once he and other older doctors were gone, there would be no more first hand accounts of the trials and abuse the profession endured in its early days. He has spoken often to chiropractic student audiences around the country; some of which are interested and others couldn't care less, he mused.

"Don't forget our history. Don't forget me. Don't forget what I went through," he said. "There's an old saying when a professional body ceases to remind itself of its history, history tends to repeat itself. Don't forget what we old-timers went through to establish what we have today."

In the gathering twilight of a long and colorful career, Dr. Herbert Ross Reaver was a proud and dedicated Doctor of Chiropractic. He was deeply committed to the art and science of his healing profession, and determined that what he and other pioneers like him accomplished would not be lost or forgotten.

Life Chiropractic College West has published a biography of Herbert Ross Reaver, D.C. -- the profession's most jailed chiropractor. Authored by Ms. Pamela Mohan and Ms. Kathleen Isaacsen, It is entitled A Man Worth Knowing.

The 155 page soft-cover biography offers insight into the extreme nature of the times in which Dr. Reaver began his practice and the extent of the prejudice and hate directed towards the chiropractors of that day. The first hand recollections of what it was like to be arrested, tried and jailed for being nothing more than a dedicated and committed chiropractor is shocking and inspiring all at the same time.

Dr. and Mrs. Reaver's lives in chiropractic are a great story all by themselves, but what is revealed in A Man Worth Knowing is the depth of commitment of the Reavers' to fairness and equality-in health care and in life. Reading A Man Worth Knowing, you learn of the Reavers' struggles to overcome racism and discrimination in Florida in the 50's and 60's, and the role the Reavers played in the lives of some of baseball's greatest players during those turbulent times.

A Man Worth Knowing is available from the Life West Bookstore at a cost of $20.00 plus tax and shipping. If you wish to order the Reavers' story, please call 510.276.9013 and ask to speak with the Bookstore. Purchases of large quantities of A Man Worth Knowing will receive a bulk sale discount. Ask the Bookstore staff for more details.

This is one of the most touching articles I have every read, and it brings me to tears every time I read it. It make me proud to be part of a profession that contains people such as Dr. Reaver who are willing to stand up to bigotry, suppression and do whatever it takes to assure that we can continue to help people.