WILLIAM SCHOLL
MISSION: Relieve foot pain.
MOMENT OF TRUTH: Ever since his boyhood days on his father’s Indiana farm and, more recently, as a shoe-store clerk in Chicago, Scholl has known people with foot pain so severe that it has hobbled them or kept them from working. Scholl vowed to find the source of the pain and try to relieve it.
BACKSTORY: Ready-made shoes come in only a few basic sizes, so they often fit poorly. Even at a high-end establishment like Ruppert’s Shoe Store, where Scholl started working in 1900, customers often complained about foot-related pain.
Scholl decided to learn more about the human body, especially feet, by attending Illinois Medical College while still working at Ruppert’s.
He came to realize that a major cause of foot pain is a weakness in the main arch. Weak arches, combined with ill-fitting shoes, lead to blisters and bunions. The feet rotate inward, causing all the joints leading up from there to become misaligned. “When your feet hurt, you hurt all over,” he says.
Scholl invented a flexible metal plate, covered with leather, that fits under the foot’s arch. The support corrects a weak arch and acts as a shock absorber. When Scholl tried his arch support on a Ruppert’s customer, the customer pronounced it “a real foot-easer!”
OUTCOME: Scholl, 22, has just graduated from medical school. He is convinced that he can help a lot of people, and that there is money to be made in foot care. Against his mentor Ruppert’s advice, Scholl has opened a small shop where he makes and sells “Foot-Eazers.” He spends long hours, and many Sundays, working in the unheated building on West Madison Street, his legs wrapped in a blanket.
PAYOFF: Customers of “Dr. Scholl” report that their health, even their incomes, have improved after using his simple device.
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UPDATES AND DETAILS
The rest of the story
In order to put together this issue of the magazine, certain liberties had to be taken. A few of the photographs, for instance, are not precisely from 1904 but are of that era. The stories have been reconstructed from various sources, including histories, biographies and Tribune files.
Page 13: Dr. William Scholl’s manufacturing company grew into an international corporation that sold everything from Air-Pillo insoles to bunion pads in its “Foot Comfort Shops,” as well as in department stores and pharmacies. The Scholl name is still synonymous with foot care, though the company was sold to Schering-Plough in 1979.
