The two yellow boxes were extremely bright among the mix of dull and unremarkable items on the auction table. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but the color caught my eye.
I picked up a long yellow box and read the top: “Dr. Scholl’s Shoe Size Detector.” The illustration showed a man’s hand inserting a metal rod into an old-fashioned woman’s shoe, dating the box as vintage. It was billed as a “necessity for every shoe buyer and shoe fitter,” and sold for $2.
Need to check your shoe size? I jokingly asked Darrell, the son of an auction-house assistant who was standing nearby. He was stationed in the box-lot room to make sure none of the items took wing and disappeared. Auction-goers do steal stuff from the tables, and Darrell was the house’s hawk-eyes over the half-dozen or so tables crammed with items that were easily pocket-able.
I opened the box, and the rod was still inside. It looked to be about 12 inches long and expandable for oversized feet. It measured length but not width – as noted in the wording on the outside cover.
The other box purported to contain one pair of “Dr. Scholl’s Scientific Arch Supports,” designed to “relieve weak and fallen arch and foot and leg pains.” The items inside the box, though, didn’t resemble those on the cover. It actually contained a dozen or so brand-new shoe horns, a slim empty box of Kent cigarettes and a clear tube of small metal items that weren’t clearly recognizable. Someone long ago had apparently used the arch supports.
The boxes were in such good condition, I told Darrell, that they may be worth more to a bidder than the products.
Dr. Scholl’s was a name that was pretty familiar to me. Who hasn’t used its products to ease corns, bunions and ingrown toenails, or worn its exercise sandals with the wooden bottom and wide straps that could be easily bought in drug stores.
But I’d never seen a Dr. Scholl’s device for checking your shoe size at home. Years ago, that was done in the shoe store. The salesperson would sit on a stool with a slanted surface in front of you, prop your foot on a flat metal device with numbers and lines, and measure your foot. (I found out that this was the Brannock foot-measuring device, first made around 1927).
I could find nothing about the shoe size detector via Google, but I did find a wooden foot-measuring tool by Dr. Scholl’s. I also learned a lot about the man behind the name.
He was Matthias Scholl, who while working for a shoe retailer in Chicago invented his first product in 1903. It was an arch support called the “Foot Eazer.” Some years later, after having graduated from medical school but not having practiced as a doctor, he started his foot-care business. Scholl used a human-foot skeleton he carried in his pocket to demonstrate his new product for shoe-store owners.
He was said to be a good marketer, paying salesmen more if they completed his correspondence course in podiatry, and sponsoring a Cinderella Foot contest and a national walking contest. He was so successful – both here and abroad – that the name Dr. Scholl’s was among the top brand names in the world by 1955.
Seeing an ad for Dr. Scholl’s Zino-pads in Redbook magazine in 1961, artist Andy Warhol recreated it in a painting called “Dr. Scholl’s Corns.” The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Scholl patented more than 1,000 products – from corn pads to cushion insoles to exercise sandals. Go into any drugstore or pharmacy and most of what you see is the bright yellow and blue packaging of the company’s products. I don’t even know if anyone else makes this stuff.
At auction, Scholl’s products were not the only ones I spotted related to the feet. On a back table was a chocolate-brown and yellow box of mentholated foot powder. Called E-Z Walk foot powder, the name sounded so Dr. Scholl’s – but it wasn’t.
