“Bonesetter, Bonesetter, We’ve come to see the Bonesetter. So when you’re feelin’ blue just come to Papa Boo, To see the Bonesetter Man. To see the Bonesetter Man…” *
In 1991, when two entrepreneurial friends named John Starner and Bill Barbour purchased the wreck of a building that had once been Club 51, they were stumped for a name for the restaurant they hoped to open. Sweating through the long clean-up and remodeling, conversation turned to Bill Barbour’s great-grandfather, Dr. John David Reese of Youngstown, Ohio, pioneer chiropractor in the United States. Reese became a celebrity in the first quarter of the 20th century, but his immigrant’s tale could be the poster story for “The American Dream.”
Much of what we know about Reese comes from a privately published biography written by David Strickler called Child of Moriah: A Biography of John D. “Bonesetter” Reese, 1885-1931. Strickler writes that Reese was born in Rhymney, Wales, May 6, 1855. Orphaned by age 12, he was shunted off to work in a foundry.
The mills were a dangerous place, and workers were often injured. Medical treatment was either nonexistent or beyond the means of those factory workers, a desperate situation because men who couldn’t work were not paid. If they were not paid, their families were not fed.
Reese was befriended and schooled by an ironworker who had a knack for manipulating injured workers’ spine, soft tissues, and joints. Such healers – primitive practitioners of what we would later call chiropractors or osteopaths - were called “bonesetters” by the Welsh working the mills and earned cult status by keeping men on the job.
Reese emigrated to the United States in 1887, found work in the Pittsburgh steel industry, saved enough money to bring his family over, then moved again to Youngstown, Ohio for work in the mills there. The story goes that his successful treatment of a co-worker’s dislocated shoulder launched his career as Youngstown’s own “Bonesetter.”
He eventually left the dangerous, grinding drudgery of the factories to pursue his unique brand of medicine full time, primarily serving the millworker community. As word grew of the expatriate Welshman’s expertise, the established medical community charged Reese with practicing medicine without a license. Intent on keeping his practice, Reese tried to go to school, but quickly washed out as a medical student at Case Western Reserve, supposedly because he could not stand the sight of blood during training.
However, those charged with teaching Reese were startled by his abilities and gave him a sort of licensure that allowed him to work as a legitimate healer. And while the focus of his practice would always be caring for the local factory workers, a gimpy professional baseball player for the Cleveland Spiders launched Reese’s star.
Dr. Reese got that player back on the field in short order. Soon, athletes were flocking to his clinic, including, according to Strickler, the future “Papa Bear,” one George Halas, who lied to Reese in order to get treatment. It seems Reese refused to work on football players, so against “violent” sports was he, so Halas made up a base-running injury in order to see the Bonesetter.
Reese’s fame continued to grow. Among his clients were Teddy Roosevelt and British politician David Lloyd George, Wales-born like the Bonesetter. He treated entertainers that numbered jugglers, acrobats, and stars in the new silent films, including the humorist Will Rogers.
But it was as our nation’s first sports med practitioner that Dr. John Reese is most remembered. In an article published online for SABR (Society For American Baseball Research), a writer named David W. Anderson cites Strickler’s book to come up with 28 future baseball Hall of Famers. Anderson draws up a sort of “All Bonesetter All-Star Team” from Reese’s clientele, a who’s-who that starts with John McGraw as the manager and includes luminaries like Honus Wager, Cy Young, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, and the hapless Shoeless Joe Jackson (http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/c067dc95 ).
As an aside, the manipulations performed by Dr. Reese were infamously excruciating. Even tough guys like Honus Wagner told one and all that while the cure was worth the pain, the healing in Reese's so-called "million dollar hands" was a force that exacted a price.
When Dr. John Reese died in November of 1931, his passing earned an obituary in The New York Times. He left behind a Youngstown that remembered him as a pleasant eccentric, was known to take the odd daytime nip at the bottle, rambling tipsy around town with his signature pipe and Mark Twain-type white suits, greeting those he knew with a comical upside-down salute. Over the years, the former foundry worker made himself into a very wealthy man. His investments included media interests that, according to Starner, made the Reese clan into the Youngstown version of our own Wolfe family. The Youngstown Vindicator newspaper was among their holdings.
Reece was beloved by his family, who knew him by the pet name, “Papa Boo.” It was this nickname that inspired Reese’s great-grandson, Bill Barbour, and family friend John Starner (fond of celebrating Thanksgiving with Barbour’s family, including the Bonesetter’s daughter Gertrude, who, like her famous father, was not adverse to continuous toasts to the season). They named their “Key West Cookery” after the Bonesetter, especially fitting because, in Lake Rat vernacular, B.O.O. is an acronym for Buckeye Ocean, Ohio.
To Starner and Barbour, it was “marketing manna from heaven,” as Starner remembers it today. Dr. Reese was known around Youngstown as “the man who never lost a friend,” and the two friends used that phrase as part mission statement/part marketing hook for their restaurant.
Barbour, who bears an uncanny resemblance to period portraits of Dr. Reese, played along, saying that the new restaurant, like its Bonesetter namesake, would provide an “adjustment” for whatever ailed its guests. Advertising made clear that what irascible neighbor Jimmy Carter less than fondly referred to as “that gin joint,” was called “Papa Boo.” Personnel answering the house phone were threatened with wage deduction if they greeted callers with “Papa Boo’s.”
Much of that has faded away. It’s Papa Boo’s now, and rightly so, with ownership building successfully on the Barbour/Starner dream. Still, April through September, guests in for Wednesday Night Trivia receive a hearty “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Papa Boo!” after the evening’s first song.
There are just some traditions too rich to let go.
(You can read more about Dr. John D. Reese in James A. Michener’s Recessional, a novel about a Florida retirement home in which a character modeled after the Bonesetter appears in a couple of chapters. You can also check out newspaper articles about Reese preserved just inside the front door of Papa Boo’s.)
* “The Bonesetter.” Words and music by Randy Lawrence ©1993 Longhunter Enterprises