SpinalColumnRadio

[originally published in KCN, January 2014]

“Deliver your message to Garcia” is hardly what you’d expect to read on a bathroom wall, but it is precisely what was scribed above the faculty toilet at the Palmer School of Chiropractic a century ago.  BJ Palmer, our profession’s developer, was known for making the walls of his learning institution “speak” — even if the wall happened to be in the bathroom.  No square inch was safe from his sign-like display of painted epigrams.  The school was covered with thousands of these short, pithy, thought-provoking sayings. They were designed to not only spark interest, but reflection, and over time, action.

While many were self-explanatory, like “Keep Smiling,” some were not. “Deliver your message to Garcia” may be nonsensical to us today, but it had great meaning and cultural popularity in the first part of the twentieth century.