“Yes, son, the only limitations to
chiropractic are the limitations of the chiropractor.”
— Dr. James King, 1957
But when Dr. James graduated one November morning just over 100 years ago, on the eve of Palmer’s 25th anniversary, it was with straight A’s. Back at the Fountainhead for Homecoming this
past September, Bill King, D.C. (Main, ’63), reflects on the legacy his father set the stage for that day. “I’m not sure we appreciate it the way we should,” he says. “When Dad graduated in 1921, it was an 18-month course and cost $200 in tuition. He could never have dreamed that four children and four grandchildren would become chiropractors. But growing up in it, it was just part of our life.” That doesn’t mean being part of a chiropractic family was easy, as Dr. Bill’s brother, Joe King, D.C. (Main, ’59), points out. “With our father, everything was happy-go-lucky,” he says. “But we were seen as oddball. The other kids ran around shouting, ‘Quack, quack,’ at us.” “Our mother passed away when I was 14,” adds
Dr. Bill. “So, with dad at the office all day, we did a lot to raise ourselves.” Indeed, by the time Dr. James reached the midpoint of his career, he was receiving hundreds of new patients and performing tens of thousands of adjustments a year. Like his father, Dr. Joe spent his first years beset
by illness. The situation became so dire that his mother and sister brought him up to Davenport to see B.J. Palmer. “B.J. X-rayed my spine and adjusted me according to the X-rays,” he recalls. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for B.J. Palmer — and my father wouldn’t have bought an X-ray unit in 1942.”
“I WANT TO BE A CHI-WO-PWACTOR LIKE MY DADDY.”
When four-year-old Meghan Dowling made this endearing announcement, she couldn’t have appreciated the full weight of her words. What she did know was that her father helped people and enjoyed doing it. “Watching him and the way people respected and appreciated him really influenced me growing up.” By the time she was delivering her
valedictorian speech at Palmer West in 2011, the fifth-generation chiropractor had no doubt about what it meant for her to continue her family’s legacy exactly 100 years after her great-great-grandparents graduated from the Fountainhead. Today, Dowling works alongside her father in the practice Jay and Mabel Austin opened in 1911, the first chiropractic office in San Jose, California. As for the next generation, Dowling wants her five children to find their own way to fulfillment. “That might be the real family legacy — generations that chose a profession that allowed them to help people and live happy, prosperous lives,” she says.
“The children saw that and wanted the same thing for themselves.”
15
QUITE A
PRECOCIOUS CHILD
What one statement from a young girl meant for her future and the legacy of the Dowling family
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