Woohoo!  This week marks forty years that I have been in practice providing Chiropractic service to our community.  It has been an amazing journey filled with so many great connections to so many people.  I thought it would be fun to share a few pictures of the four offices I have had over those forty years.  Some of you will remember all of them as many of the patients I connected with way back in my first office in Citrus Heights are still seeing me today whenever they need a bit of a tune-up.  So, let's turn the clock back a few years and peek in on forty years of moves and changes.

The storyboard actually starts almost a year earlier in April of 1981 when I graduated from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic in Glendale, California.  I was in the last class at the old campus on East Broadway before they moved to Whittier.  After graduation, I had to buckle down to some heavy studying for the state boards for a bit while working at a gas station for a whopping $1.05 per hour in the evenings.  Just to liven things up, my wife, Mindy, was expecting our firstborn son in August.  Shortly after his birth, I went up to San Clemente to work for Dr. Kelly doing his exams and x-rays for a few months until my license came through.  Around Christmas time we started traveling up the state looking for a good area to start a practice of my own.  We found quite a few lovely places, but the best option looked like Citrus Heights.  This was semi-close to my childhood home up in Colfax and we were fortunate enough to be able to move into my folk's basement while I looked for office space.

Almost immediately I found an old vacant dental office in the back half of an accountancy firm.  This was a great find because other than new carpet, paint, furniture, a treatment table, and assorted office supplies, we were able to move in within a short time.  It was the first week of February in 1982 when we officially opened for business – forty years ago this week.  My first patient was a gal named Margaret who wandered by while I was painting the week before and asked what kind of office I was working on.  Once I told her, she wanted to be my first patient!

Things felt really official when I got out to Denio's flea market in Roseville and had this lovely official sign made up to put on the front of the building.

This office served us well for almost eight years until I switched the Chiropractic technique I was using to Network Chiropractic.  This technique required us to have many treatment tables so patients could process the changes in their bodies over about half an hour.  I was adjusting people all over the place once I converted my doctor's office, business office, and therapy room into additional treatment areas.  It became too crazy running between all those rooms, so we started looking for a new place with one big room to fit everyone.

With an active imagination, we settled on the old red farmhouse on Crestline Avenue in old Fair Oaks.  We converted the sun porch into a treatment area, the kitchen into a nutrition office, and put massage therapists upstairs.  I had partnered with Susan Sarback in this venture as she wanted to give her art classes a physical home.  We designed the porch treatment area to be easily converted into an art classroom on the weekends.  This combination of art school and Chiropractic gave rise to our new name – Fair Oaks Healing & Arts Center.

A few years later (1993) my new sweetheart, Ellen Flowers, decided we needed to have a big birthday party to celebrate my 50^th birthday.  A few of you may remember that party... 

We loved that old house, but its age started catching up with it.  The electrical system kept blowing out and it was so old it used bare wire on posts in places and replacement parts were no longer available.  Our landlady refused to upgrade the system even though I offered to pay for it, so we had to find another new office.  This is when we found an open spot in an office complex up on Sunset Avenue.  We were kind of hidden way in the back, but the spot had a glorious amount of room, which initially we got for a good rental price.  I was no longer doing Network, so I used just one small room for my treatments.  This office had so much room that we were able to host exercise classes, like Tai Chi. 
We had a library, two massage rooms, a counseling room, and a therapy room.  We had to do considerable renovation to make the space into the lovely environment we finally enjoyed.  By September of 2005, we were able to shift into our new office.

This office served us well for seven years until the building was repossessed by the bank and everyone left since their leases were now null.  We started searching for another new location anticipating that the bank would sell the complex out from under us.  On the advice of my receptionist, Susie, we started looking for a place I could own, so we would not have to deal with landladies or banks anymore.  I did not have a lot of money, but I was able to take a loan against my house to get into the property we have finally come to rest in. 
Buying a business property is an expensive proposition normally unless the property is in such bad shape that it is ready to be torn down.  Well, I decided to take on that challenge.  This was in 2011, and it took almost a year to rebuild the property to make it useable.  I spent forever trying to get plans approved by the county, which was complicated by having to bring everything up to modern code, including handicap code.  This meant enlarging bathrooms, putting in ramps, and altering the parking lot.  Thank goodness for the adaptability of my contractor, Kent, who was able to keep adding further work to bring the building up to code as the inspectors kept finding new problems.  While he did that, I did the demo work, built a front desk, and laid tiles.   We moved in in  November of 2012 with a lovely fresh green paint job on the building exterior, including the huge stone corners on the front.

Everything went well for a couple of months until the rains came and we discovered that the roof was also shot.  This prompted me to use the opportunity to upgrade the whole look of the building by building a false front on the roof to help the building look more like the complexes next door to us.  This meant a lot more time hanging out at the county building department getting approval since they insisted that the taller front would catch the wind during a hurricane and needed to be engineered to be able to withstand that level of wind.  That required us to rip out the front of the building, replace the electrical, and re-plaster the whole building.  Really, it probably would have been cheaper to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch.

Well, here we are today.  Other than the septic tank occasionally backing up and flooding the left side of the building, we are doing well.  I expect that I will be staying here until I retire.  With all the work that has gone into this building, I expect that I will work for another 10 years, thus making it to 50 years of service. That would be an accomplishment!  I just need my body to hold up without a lot of renovation (unlike the building).

So, I thank all of you that have participated with me over the years as patients and for following me from one location to the next.  Your presence is truly appreciated.  I am blessed to have been given the opportunity to be of service to so many people.  For me, this is the purpose of being alive.  I get to pursue becoming myself within the context of being of service to others.

Thank you so much,

David   

Ellen update:   

I was searching through my computer for photos of my old office locations to prepare for today's articles when I came across this old photo of Ellen and her favorite boyfriend, Zeal.  They would spend endless hours in this very close cuddly embrace.  I was simply the runner up on the household priority scale.