I am so excited. I am getting ready to get started with my son generation 3 of Weber Chiropractic.
My ego would like me to think that all the Armstrong County residents have at least heard of Weber Chiropractic. There are quite a few that have not heard of us, I am sure. When I look at life from a generational timeline, the name Weber has been associated with chiropractic in this community since 1954!! It is likely that some of you may have known my father and some of you know me as well, but do you know the history of Weber Chiropractic? Would you believe that none of what you know about Weber Chiropractic would exist if it weren’t for the Sears company? Grab a drink and an easy chair and let me give you the history of Weber Chiropractic.
My Dad grew up in Clairton, Pa. Clairton was a steel town on the Monongahela River between Glassport and Elizabeth. I can remember riding down the road along the river as a child when we went to visit my grandparents. There were a lot of the old Frick coke ovens still baking the coal into coke and as you drove into Clairton it always smelled like rotten eggs. When we would go home at night, we could see into the open end of the US Steel factory (Clairton Mill Works) where my grandfather used to be a shift foreman. You could see the hot steel moving along inside the factory.
Dad graduated from high school at the close of WWII. He got a job after graduation at that mill marking the newly produced steel ingots for scale blemishes. These blemishes would need to be cut from the ingots, those ingot pieces would be melted, and re poured in order to give only the best quality steel. One day shortly after getting hired, Dad was marking the steel when Grandpa walked up to him and told him to stop doing what he was doing. Grandpa was a shift foreman, and the workers on Grandpa’s shift were paid a bonus for making more tonnage of steel than was required. When Dad marked the steel to be reheated and re-poured, it was cutting the bonus from Grandpa and his crew. It must have been one heck of a confrontation, because the next day Dad said he quit and joined the Army. He went to the Army band that was stationed in Berlin immediately after the war.
Dad said there had been a chiropractor that lived in his neighborhood when he grew up. He said that during the depression the chiropractor and the teachers were the only people that seemed to be working. Those were the people that Dad would shovel snow and cut grass for. It must have made an impression because when Dad left the Army, he used his GI bill to become a chiropractor.
Dad went to Indianapolis to enroll in Lincoln Chiropractic College. He said he enjoyed his time there but could not wait to get home to Pennsylvania. While he was finishing his education by working in the school clinic, he had a part time job at Sears & Roebuck Company selling appliances. In those days, there weren’t any credit cards. If you wanted to buy a larger priced appliance like a washer or dryer, you needed to go to the in-store credit department and establish a new line of credit with the store. Dad was very fond of telling how he was motivated to sell the appliances because he would always take his customer back to the cute brunette in the finance department. He called her Joanne, but I knew her as mom.
Mom and Dad were married just before he left to come home to Pennsylvania. He found a chiropractor in Greenville, Pa that he was able to work as an associate with until he was licensed. He and Mom wanted to settle in Indiana, Pennsylvania and he worked with another chiropractor there for a while. I actually have a picture of Dad, the chiropractor he was working with, and Dr. John Di Mond’s father (Dr. Justin Di Mond’s grandfather) from the Indiana Pennsylvania newspaper, from a news item where they were giving away backpacks to school children. Dad finally decided he wanted to move to Kittanning but was unable to find a suitable place to start an office for rent there, so he ended up in Ford City. That was late summer 1955.
Mom and Dad set up in a two-bedroom apartment the office and their home. I came home to live with them in October of 1955. When I was in 7th grade my dad purchased a two bedroom home just out of town on Route 66 south and moved his office to that location. He stayed at that location until 1993 when he retired. I started college in the fall of 1973 at Clarion State College as it was known then and transferred to the National College of Chiropractic in 1977. I graduated with my chiropractic degree in 1980. My first office was in West Kittanning.
I practiced in that building for a year and a half but was getting married and needed to save some expenses. I bought a house in Worthington and remodeled a 500 square foot garage into an office for my practice. The community of Worthington was so very receptive to my practice being there and I am ever so grateful to all those kind people that have supported my practice over the years. I finally outgrew that building and purchased the building of my current location 30 years ago.
About the time I was moving into my current location, my wife gave birth to my youngest son, Patric. Patric will graduate from the National University of Health Sciences on December 16th of this year. This will be the start of generation number 3 of Weber Chiropractic. I’m really looking forward to opening this next chapter of the book. Patric will be working in the current location of the practice with me, and we have some awesome ideas for expanding and extending our service to the community. I know this sounds like it was all about the Weber family, but really it was a story that acknowledges the wonderful people of western Pennsylvania that have supported us since 1955. We are approaching the seventy-year anniversary of the start of a Weber Chiropractic association with this wonderful community. I consider myself fortunate to have been a part of this and want to thank all of you for this. I also would respectfully ask you to please come out to meet Patric in January 2024. It would be our honor to greet you!