the chiropractor

1953 Ellensburg Church of the Nazarene

Recently stumbled on this photograph. Justin and me one in from the end on the right.  Justin elbowing himself away from the kid in the high cuffs.  His mother watched us sometimes on a Saturday, remember having lunch in their upstairs apartment a block or two away from the church.


Realizing that one can hardly rely on sixty two year old memories, it's hard not to scan the crowd for familiar faces.  I don't see Jack Morrow. At least no one who fits my mental image of the guy; Marlboro man.  I'd be surprised if that isn't mom and dad and Vesta in the third row on the left though.

It took a while to sort out the kids.  For a long time I had the big kid in the glasses on the left of the front row confused with the little guy standing in front of his mother, just over Justin's right shoulder.  That kid taught me how to make a super-duper and I think of him every time I stir  green peas into mashed potato and cover with dark savory gravy.  One Sunday dinner after church at their house he showed me that trick.  My mom would have called me down for the mess, but his folks didn't seem to mind.

Big kid with glasses is Tracy Johnson.  That's his little brother sitting next, can't remember his name. Their old man Rex, portrait photographer by trade, is standing behind the camera.  Old school, duck under the black curtain at the back of the camera. Crack a joke to loosen up the crowd. 

Remember Rex as quite the character.  One day he showed up at our place in a shiny new car. He had a job for the day driving the car over the hump into Seattle. Dealership delivery of some kind.  Invited Justin and me to pile in the back, along with Tracy and brother; come along for the ride. If the ultimate buyer of the car objected to having four rambunctious boys bounce around all over the seats for three hours on the way over the pass, no one mentioned it in my hearing.  

First car any of us had seen with a windshield washer.  Sight of water suddenly squirting up on the windshield while the car drove along the highway blew our little minds.  Riffing on the novelty, Rex added his own sounds and gestures that got us laughing uncontrollably.  Not once, but time after time.  Things would quiet down for a while then one of our voices would call out, do the squirt thing again, and off we went.  Would have driven me around the bend as an adult.  Rex had a heart of gold and nerves of steel.

On the way back in a normal car without the windshield washer I forgot and blurted out do the squirt thing again.  Rest of the boys made sure I understood the foolishness of the mistake.

Johnson's had a recording machine that cut 78rpm records. Looked like an over-sized record player, turntable and some kind of tone arm that cut groves into record blanks.  One evening we sang She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain for recording.  Justin and Tracy singing together, me and little brother shouting Yehoo at the end of each line.  Love to have that disk now.

Second row back from Justin and me, old man of the kid who showed me the super duper, made his living as a chiropractor.  Apparently he believed in the pre scientific notion that vertebral subluxation caused most if not all physical ailments, and that chiropractic adjustments cured a wide variety of ailments.

The year before Justin had been in the hospital with Rheumatic fever, still under treatment by the doctors up in Wenatchee.  Our resident chiropractor felt strongly that the folks should discontinue the antibiotics in favor of chiropractic adjustments.   Mom and dad considered him a quack.  Great guy and all, backbone of the church community, wonderful husband and family man, but quack nonetheless. 

I remembered Justin's illness mostly in the context of fun trips down to Wenatchee.  We lived up in Ephrata in those days, fifty miles to the east along highway 28.  From the back seat of the car my little mind spun out an elaborate fantasy in which a character named Del-bo lived in castle like surroundings in among the cliffs that rise above the road as it drops down from the high plane and follows the river for a few miles south of Wanatchee.  

Too young to go into the hospital to visit, folks dropped me off  the McAbees, family who had the local Nazerine church.  Those girls taught me some important kid stuff.  How to slide down carpeted stairs on your but, and how to chew tar.

The tar thing is cool, don't know if kids now days remember the trick.  One hot summer afternoon when we were hanging out under the tree in McAbee's front yard when a couple guys from the city came around filling potholes in the street. Us kids ran over to watch.

After tamping in a couple shovels of gravel they filled the pothole with thick shiny black pitch, hot from a small tank trailer, that had a burner under the bottom.

As soon as the men drove away we grabbed sticks and scooped globs of the still warm tar up, let it cool then broke off bubble gum sized chunks.  Chews as good Bazooka.  No bubbles though, and not so sweet.

So anyway, dad gets this job over in Ellensburg a few months later, and a prominent member of the church is a chiropractor pressuring him about Justin's followup treatment to a serious illness. Stop taking him up to the medical doctors in Wenatchee, bring him in for chiropractic adjustments. In a thirty seven member congregation, young preacher feels the strain.  Worse than an occasional dinner out at the wolf's lair. Within a few months we settled into a somewhat more comfortable job down in Walla Walla.

Child of the sixties for much of my adult life all sorts on new age woo and wonder struck me as interesting and fun.  Star charts and auras, wisdom of the ages, ancient herbal remedies, even believed I possessed limited powers of shamanic healing.  Fill in the blank spaces with god of the gaps Christianity.  Behind it all, or so I want to think now, a voice of reason quietly questioned everything.

These days my attitude tends to be more skeptical.  From my perspective physical realism recognizes levels of elegant beauty in the universe that surpass anything humankind has dreamed up through the wisdom traditions.  Thin end of the wedge driving me from credulous believer in all sorts of nonsense may well have been mom and dad's tensions with that chiropractor.

If a guy "half a hundred" years old, in the words of my dad after a particularly tense telephone conversation I overheard, could be wrong about chiropractic, maybe some of the other less credible beliefs we shared as a community could come into question.