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Passions & Pursuits

Chiropractors With Collections
By Jennifer Maciejewski

face image Though it may be unusual to decorate your home with a Coca-Cola theme or to search high and low for B.J. Palmer memorabilia, having unique collections is just what the doctor ordered for these four chiropractors. Here, they share the details of their passions, from their most treasured possessions to the moment that started it all.

A Rockin’ Collection
When Peter Joffe, D.C., pulled a muscle in his back while bowling with some friends during college, he tried everything from painkillers to hot packs, but nothing touched the pain. After a few days, he visited the chiropractor that his sister used after a car accident, and within a couple of visits, his pain was gone. By his senior year, the biology major had decided to become a chiropractor, and today Joffe, who specializes in the Chiropractic Bio-Physics (CBP) technique, operates Joffe Family Chiropractic in Manalapan, N.J.

While his passion for chiropractic has its roots in his college years, Joffe began collecting KISS memorabilia when he was just a toddler, after his teenage brother introduced him to the band. “At that age, usually little kids are either deathly afraid of KISS or think they’re like superheroes,” Joffe recalls. “I was definitely the latter. At that age, I got things like the original KISS dolls and the original KISS lunchbox for Christmas and birthdays. I used to take the lunchbox to nursery school and kindergarten. As I got older, I started to get into not only collecting the albums, but different pictures, posters and KISS videos. I used to go to KISS conventions and collect stuff like that. My room at my parents’ house used to look like a KISS shrine; once I ran out of wall space, I started putting stuff up on the ceiling.”

Over the years, Joffe has had several items autographed by members of the band, including books, albums and his childhood lunchbox. And not only has he been to over 20 concerts at which he’s caught several guitar pics, he attended the funeral when KISS’s second drummer died.

Though Joffe plans to create a KISS-themed guitar room once he moves into a larger home, for now, he stores his collection in Tupperware totes in his townhome’s basement. After all, his wife isn’t quite as into KISS as he is. “That’s partially why it’s in the basement,” Joffe notes. “She’s starting to get used to my KISS obsession. My birthday was a couple weeks ago, so she bought me a collector’s edition KISS picture that has a gold single of theirs, and actually, she let me hang it up on a wall that leads down to our basement. Whatever house is going to accommodate it, I’m definitely going to have a KISS music room so I can put all of my KISS stuff back on display.”

Coke is It
Jeff McKinley, D.C., has known that he wanted to be a doctor ever since the first teacher asked him, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When he was in seventh grade, his best friend’s father, a chiropractor, introduced him to the profession. Once McKinley learned that he could help people get, and stay, healthy, without drugs or surgery, he knew that he would become a chiropractor himself. Today, McKinley works as the only certified chiropractic sports physician in Warren County, Tenn.—a skill that comes in handy since he has two daughters who play middle school basketball.

It was a chance purchase that McKinley made while still in chiropractic school that started his Coca-Cola collection. While living in his first apartment, McKinley found himself in need of drinking glasses, so he headed down to the local Woolworth’s store and picked up some Coke glasses that were on sale. The glasses reminded him of a cherished childhood memory, and from there, he gradually added more and more things.

“My grandfather lived in Birmingham, Ala., and I grew up in Indiana,” McKinley recalls. “We would drive down to visit him in the summer. He would always have me help out around the house with different chores and yard work, and he always rewarded me with an ice-cold Coke. After you helped him out or did something good, you’d go downstairs, and you could get a Coke out of the refrigerator down in his basement. He had one of the old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle openers on the pole right next to the refrigerator that you could use to pop the top.” In fact, that bottle opener has become the cornerstone of his collection. Today, his kids use it to pop open a Coke from the 1964 Coke machine in his basement. In addition to different cans and bottles of Coke from countries around the world, McKinley’s collection includes everything from Christmas ornaments to the Tiffany lamp that sits on his office desk. He even decked out his daughter’s nursery with a Coca-Cola theme, adding red gingham-checked curtains and bedding and using a high shelf to display the various bottles and glasses.His recreation room is also decorated with Coca-Cola colors and signage.

Though sentimental value feeds his collecting bug, McKinley shares his Coke memories with others. Both when he served as president of the Rotary Club and as president of the Tennessee Chiropractic Association, he would give out an Ice Cold Coke Award to people who did a good job, sharing the story of his grandfather’s Coke rewards and using his grandfather’s bottle opener to pop the top. And while he plans to pass on bits and pieces of his collection to his own kids when they move out, the Coke machine and bottle opener won’t be up for grabs. After all, keeping them gives McKinley a chance to carry on the tradition with his own grandchildren.

One Man, Many Collections
Believing that chiropractors were quacks and charlatans, it took an acquaintance literally dragging Bob Dubin, D.C., by the ear to a chiropractor’s office in the early 1970s for his opinion to change. Uninsured and unable to afford the surgery needed to repair a back injury, he resigned himself to a life of misery and suffering. But after just one major adjustment from the chiropractor, Dubin’s pain vanished, and he could stand up straight again.

Dubin was hooked. The self-described holistic chiropractor enrolled in chiropractic college, and he went on to become known as the chiropractor’s chiropractor in California and serve as president of both the California and the New Mexico Chiropractors Associations.

Before becoming a chiropractor, Dubin studied jewelry design and fabrication, an interest that sparked one of his first collections: gemstones, which eventually grew to include minerals and fossils. Prized items include a high-grade amethyst cathedral, that’s roughly 18-inches tall and a foot across and weighs approximately 100 pounds, and a fully-detailed trilobyte fossil, which is considered to be the predecessor of the lobster—at seven inches long, it’s significantly larger than the predominate two-inch specimens.

In addition to the fossils and minerals, Dubin displays his wife’s extensive collection of cobalt blue glass and several crystal balls in their family’s great room, which the Dubins had custom-built to showcase the pieces. Plus, living in New Mexico proves to be the ideal location for growing one of Dubin’s other collections: hot sauce bottles. Not only does he have 250 bottles in his kitchen, but he has spent the last 25 years perfecting his own formulation, Chili Soulamente, available online at soulofthechile.com.

“I’ve been collecting for a long time,” Dubin explains. “My parents were products of the depression, and during my entire early life, I was always told that you need to prepare for the future, you need to save things, don’t waste anything, don’t throw anything away. My first collection actually was hardware: screws, nuts and tools. I was always terrified to throw things away. My wife thinks it’s very amusing. When we moved from California to New Mexico, we took 15,000 pounds of stuff with us, and most of it was stuff I had accumulated and didn’t want to let go.”

Dubin plans to pass his numerous collections on to his daughter, who will likely have the same difficulty parting with the pieces as her father. After all, she’s caught the collecting bug herself, though her current collections focus on French poster art and black artifacts, from rocks to mirrors.

Preserving Chiropractic History
Though Timothy J. Feuling, D.C., first found a “watered-down version” of chiropractic after breaking his back in a slip-and-fall accident in 1991, the experience sparked his interest in the field. In 1996, Feuling began working within the profession, and his interest has only grown.

Over the past decade, he has written and co-written numerous books and articles, including “Chiropractic Compassion and Expectation,” “Chiropractic Works!,” “From Student to Doctor—How to Transition into Practice,” and he currently serves as the president of the Chiropractic Benefit Services Malpractice Program. “This allows me the opportunity to serve what I love—chiropractors and chiropractic,” Feuling explains. “I spend my days empowering doctors of chiropractic on risk management and other information to help them avoid the pitfalls of malpractice and professional board problems.”

While Feuling currently educates chiropractors about risk management, he plans to add a new dimension when he opens a museum dedicated to the history of chiropractic in San Diego, Calif. Inspired by the history and philosophy of chiropractic—from B.J. Palmer’s lifelong fight to develop the science, philosophy and art of chiropractic to the early chiropractic pioneers who served prison time for practicing chiropractic—Feuling has spent the past seven years building an impressive collection of chiropractic memorabilia, with an emphasis on items related to B.J. Palmer and his son.

Feuling’s collection includes a complete Palmer Chiropractic Green Book Collection, three-fourths of which are signed by the authors; Palmer Yearbooks from the first few decades of chiropractic; early chiropractic instrumentation, such as nervoscopes, a neurocalometer and heartometer; photographs; reel-to-reels; original negatives; early pamphlets; books; paintings; newspaper clippings; and the list goes on. Key artifacts include an original neurocalometer in an oak box in mint working condition, and a 1910 first edition of D.D. Palmer’s book, “The Text-book of the Science, Art and Philosophy of Chiropractic,” which was previously owned by three early chiropractic pioneers, including Dr. Bertrand DeJarnette, the developer of SOT chiropractic care.

And he’s not done yet. Feuling stays on the lookout for new artifacts. He hopes to amass a large enough collection to open the museum by 2010, and he plans to write a book about the history of chiropractic within the next decade. People who have early chiropractic items of any kind that they would like to sell or donate to the museum can contact Feuling by phone at (858) 229-5518 or e-mail tfeuling@sbcglobal.net.

“The most important factor in my collecting is that I am doing exactly what B.J. Palmer asked our profession to do: guard it well,” Feuling says. “I am safeguarding every possible shred of history I can, so the new generations and the current generations of chiropractors and chiropractic patients can see what our profession has gone through to get where we are today. If I can contribute by opening the eyes of a few here and there, more power to chiropractic.”