Last March the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine published an excerpt from When We Were Young: A Baby Boomer Yearbook in which the author described memorable events of the year 1968. But it was the account of neither the infamous Democratic National Convention nor the assassination of Martin Luther King that attracted the notice of Oliver Field, the former director of the American Medical Association’s Bureau of Investigation. It was rather the author’s use of quotation marks in a passing mention of “Dr.” William Scholl among notables who died in 1968.
The name “Dr. Scholl” is arguably among the ten most instantly recognized brand names in the world. Speak those two words in public and virtually everyone thinks feet and instantly pictures those omnipresent retail displays of Scholl products in yellow packaging. Most people probably assume Dr. Scholl never existed–that he’s a trademark character like so many others, artificially conceived in the petri dishes of advertising agencies, a cohort of Betty Crocker, Mr. Goodwrench, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Jemima.
Scholl designed the first self-service store module where customers could personally pluck products off a freestanding display instead of waiting for clerks to fetch their choices. And he was among the first advocates of national advertising campaigns in high-profile media, spending large sums to extol his products (and events like “Foot Comfort Week”) in magazines including the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Women’s Home Companion even during the darkest days of the Great Depression.
Heise suggests another, more intriguing reason for the absence of posthumous notoriety: the low regard with which the human foot and those who minister to it are held by the general populace. The truth is many people just don’t like their feet–the way they look, the way they hurt, the way they sweat, the way they smell. And while they may be grateful for the relief provided by a Zino-pad or a Walk-Strate heel cushion, few are inspired to extol the inventor of the product or marvel at the skill of the specialist who prescribed it. Thus the giants of early Chicago are the architects, the bridge builders, the railroad magnates, the industrialists, the philanthropists, even the criminals (especially the criminals)–but not the man who devoted a lifetime to something as pedestrian as the human foot.
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“What kind of highly stimulated person he must have been to achieve so much in an era before marketing as we know it had even been conceived,” Geppner marvels. “He is a piece of history the business world should know about and the public should know about. He wasn’t just brilliant, he was possessed by this amazing instinct to educate.”
By 1905 he was marketing his products with gusto. Scholl’s approach was to drop into a shoe store unannounced, ask for the manager, and plunk down on the counter the skeleton of a human foot that he always carried with him. Having gotten the manager’s attention, he would then point out that the foot, with its 28 delicate bones, is the most complicated and overworked appendage on the body and therefore deserves the sort of respect and comfort available exclusively through the new Scholl products.
