Adjusting to retirement

After 34 years providing chiropractic care in Havre, Dr. Tom and Judi Adams are retiring, and not even a day too soon for the doctor, who is an avid outdoorsman.

"Our last day is Dec. 14th - because Dec. 15th is opening day of (elk) shoulder season," Tom said as if he were delivering the punchline to a great story.

While they pointed out the row of medical files they've accumulated over the past three-and-a-half decades - around 2,000 of them considered still active - and looked back at a rewarding career together with Tom providing chiropractic care and Judi managing the office, they also talked about how this career hadn't even been on their radar in the beginning.

Tom was born in Havre and attended school through fourth grade at St. Jude Catholic School, but his family moved to Pleasanton, California, in 1962.

He and Judi attended fifth grade together there.

Tom grew up on thoroughbred race tracks in Montana and California, he said, with his dad, grandpa and uncles all training and racing horses.

"As a kid - we were just talking about this," he said, "we didn't go hunting and fishing. Dad always had a two-horse trailer, and we'd go to state fair, Fort Benton, Belgrade, Kalispell."

And when they moved to Pleasanton, he said, they were based out of Alameda County Fairgrounds, which had 22 barns with 40-stalls each and a one-mile track.

Tom said he started in the family business walking race horses for a dollar then became a groom, and during his last two years of high school he was a full-time exercise boy, living in a tack room, getting up at 4:30 a.m. to feed horses and go to work at 5 a.m. The couple he worked for, Newt and Marnye Bunyard, were adamant about him attending school, though.

"They were very pro-education," Judi said.

"Like a second mom and dad," Tom added.

That emphasis on education stuck with Tom and Judi, and while they married right after graduating high school and started a family soon after, Tom started school at University of California-Davis. His intent was to get his bachelor's degree there and go on to veterinary school.

That career choice was derailed in the spring of his senior year, he said, when he wasn't accepted to vet school.

Tom graduated, went back to the track and eventually started working at a feed store, too. After his third big wreck on the track, he said, he was considering taking a management position at the feed store when he was presented with the idea of becoming a chiropractor.

Judi said Tom's dad was using a chiropractor she had babysat for when she was a teenager, and he talked to Tom about going to Palmer College of Chiropractic West Campus nearby. Tom already had his undergraduate prerequisites taken care of from UC-Davis, so he had only four more years of study to get his Doctor of Chiropractic.

It wasn't just Tom preparing for this new career, though. Judi said she went to work for the chiropractor to learn how to manage the office.

"So it worked when he got out of school because they don't teach the business side of things too often - how to handle insurance and the front desk - and then he could just (take care of) the patients," she said. "It doesn't work for everybody, but somehow it's always worked for us to work together -"

"- for 34 years and four or five months," Tom added.

"It's ultimately his practice, but we each have our areas," Judi said.

Tom still had family in north-central Montana, aunts, uncles and cousins, he said, and it had always been his plan to move back, so during his second year at Palmer he called a Havre chiropractor, Dr. Smith, and Smith told him to call back when he graduated.

Tom passed his boards in May 1982, then he, Judi and their two boys, Scotty in kindergarten and Jimmy in third-grade at the time, moved to Havre Aug. 1 - 20 years after Tom had left as a boy with his family.

Tom took over the practice from Smith, who retired, and he became one of four chiropractors in Havre.

"That's what I wanted to do here, but I couldn't find anybody," Tom said, about closing his office rather than passing it along to another provider. "I had a connection to come back to, family."

His concern for continuity of care for his patients has kept Tom and Judi working for a few years past when they started talking about retiring, but he said he's confident that people will find good care with one of the three chiropractors remaining in Havre or one in surrounding communities.

While many retirees make plans to move where the weather is warmer or take extravagant trips, Tom and Judi said they have more modest ideas about retirement.

"Havre is our home," they both said, and they don't have plans to leave for more than short trips to visit friends - including a "bucket list" trip to visit Marnye in Los Angeles.

They have friends and family here, they said. They raised their boys here, and, though Jimmy died in 1995, Scott moved back to Havre a year-and-a-half ago from Arizona with his wife, Lesli, who is a school psychologist, and their two daughters, 4 and 6.

They get to see the grand-dauthers almost daily, now, they said, and Scott's older boys come to visit more often.

Tom's list for retirement plans, contrary to his childhood of horses and race tracks, is for hunting, fishing, golfing and bow hunting, he said quickly, ticking off each item of the list on a finger.

One week of hunting "in God's country south of Malta," has been an annual trek, Tom said, adding that he's bagged 10 elk while bowhunting since his first one in 1990.

Judi said she is planning more granddaughter time and spending more time in the yard and garden come spring.

"I've worked since I was 14," she said, so has contingency plans to do volunteer work if she gets bored.

"We've had 34 years of great associations with our patients and clients and, you know, we'll miss that," she said.

"I can count on one hand after that many years the number of people that I said 'I don't think I can help. You gotta go somewhere else,' because it just wasn't going to work," Tom said. "That's pretty good."