When Richard Scott began his practice in Le Sueur, Harry Truman was president, patients sometimes paid him in hams and chickens, and the U.S. medical community regarded chiropractors and charlatans as a horse apiece.

“The AMA had a Committee on Quackery to run us out of the business,” Scott said.

In fact, Morris Fishbein, then secretary of the American Medical Association, called chiropractors “rabid dogs” and labeled them “playful and cute, but killers.”

But what a difference 60 years makes. That’s how long the 84-year-old Scott has been plying his skills in Le Sueur.

“I set a goal of 60 years, and now I’m going to go one year at a time, Lord willing.”

He dropped anchor there in 1949. He and wife Rosemary are from big cities — he from St. Paul, she from St. Louis — but they quickly warmed to small-town living.

“We love it. Wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he said.

To hear some of his patients, they wouldn’t trade him for anything either.

“I call him the ‘voodoo man,’” said retired food scientist Frank Ebert, who was plagued by sciatica when he sought Scott’s aid upon the recommendation of a medical doctor.

Two months later, Ebert’s nerve-related pain had exited.

“The guy just totally amazed me. I’ve kept going to him because he keeps me totally tweaked. I’m 68 and I act like I’m 40.”

Scott’s interest in chiropractic stemmed from his difficult birth. The doctor had to yank and tug, misaligning his neck bones and perhaps affecting nerves.

As a child he suffered from earaches and crossed eyes. His mother took him to a St. Paul chiropractor — “great big guy, used to be a boxer” — and Scott was set right.

When he began his practice in Le Sueur, chiropractors were still rare birds forced to deal with a public’s wariness.

But when he began helping people get healthy one after another, their leeriness gave way to advocacy.