At 92, Sullivan chiropractor Dr. Ellery Anderson’s healing hands are still working their magic.
“They won’t let me quit,” Anderson tells his patients when asked if he had any plans to retire.
“ ‘You can’t quit. You’re going to live to be 100,’ ” they say.
Anderson was born June 28, 1924, and grew up on a farm in Shell Lake, Wis. He could quite possibly be the oldest practicing chiropractor in the county, if not even the country.
Anderson said it was his childhood asthma that led him into the chiropractic business. He graduated from high school in 1944 and registered to serve in World War II, but his asthma kept him out of the service.
At the time, Anderson was seeing a chiropractor in Wisconsin, who advised him to go to St. Louis and become a chiropractor himself.
“He said that way I could go to St. Louis and get the treatments for free and get an education and become a chiropractor at the same time,” Anderson said. “So that’s what I did.”
Anderson went to Logan University, a chiropractic college based in St. Louis. He graduated in 1946, and he and a couple of classmates opened a practice on Enright Street near the Delmar Loop in University City.
After his colleagues left the practice a couple of years later, Anderson moved his practice to Pacific, where he met his wife, Janet. They were married for 76 years. She passed away in June of last year.
Anderson only practiced in Pacific for about nine months. He and Janet moved after a patient from Sullivan talked him into relocating his practice there.
“My wife and I got on a bus and came up here to (Sullivan),” he said. “I started looking for an office and couldn’t find one.”
In 1949, Anderson ended up in an office above a Phillips 66 gas station and has remained in Sullivan ever since.
Anderson said his business has been built on word-of-mouth advertising.
“I’ve never put an ad in the paper,” he said. “The only time I ever did was when I first opened here, but I haven’t advertised since.”
Anderson has had patients from as far as Washington.
He said he believes it’s his attentiveness to his patients that keeps them coming back.
“It’s not this in-and-out stuff,” he said. “When I work on somebody, they know they’ve been worked on.”
Back when he first started practicing, Anderson said doctors were charging $3 a visit. He charged $2.
“I’ve always kept my prices low so people can afford it,” he said. “I charge what someone would have to pay for the co-payment. Then I don’t have to fool with insurance.”
Anderson’s present office in Sullivan is situated in an older home on Vine Street. The waiting room, a former front porch Anderson and family members enclosed, reflects his roots with pictures related to farm life. There are no computers or other modern electronics to be found. He even still uses an old rotary telephone.
“There were two little girls who had missed the bus to school outside the office one day,” he said. “They came in and wanted to use the phone. I was working on a patient and told them the phone was on the desk. I was working and didn’t hear anything.”
The girls, who had never seen a rotary phone, told Anderson they couldn’t find it.
“They had never seen one of them,” he said of his old-fashioned phone. “Isn’t that something?”
Anderson said work is the secret to his longevity.
“I’m going to have to quit someday,” he said. “But the Good Lord keeps me here for a reason, and I’m going to keep on doing it until I can’t anymore.
“When I can help someone along the way, then my living will not be in vain. God gave me, in my hands, the ability to cure, and I’m going to keep going until I die.”
