EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. - Bill Austin still has Ronald Reagan's
ear.
It's sitting on his desk, a curvaceous plaster impression
used to create the first presidential ear mold back in 1983
in Austin's Starkey Laboratories here in suburban Minneapolis.
"I really don't know what to do with it," he says with a laugh.
Sell it on eBay? "I suppose I could, but I never would. Maybe
someone would buy it, but why? I'd be worried about that person."
The Reagan ear is among the artifacts of Austin's career as
one of the leading figures of American hearing health. The college
dropout became a hearing-aid innovator and the largest U.S.
maker of hearing aids. He's a multimillionaire with a clientele
that has included five U.S. presidents (current President Bush
wears Starkey hunter's plugs) and a list of celebrities such
as Sting, Paul Newman, Dolly Parton and the late Mother Teresa.
Yet Austin, 64, is just as likely to notice a waiter having
trouble hearing and fly him on a private jet to the lab to be
fitted for free hearing aids. He has circled the globe to give
free devices to more than 78,000 poor people through his Starkey
Hearing Foundation. He was honored last spring as Humanitarian
of the Year by Variety International, a major children's charity.
Other recipients have included Danny Kaye and Audrey Hepburn.
"Bill's foundation has done a tremendous amount of work for
children, and he himself goes on about 150 charitable missions
a year personally at his own expense," says legendary game-show
host Monty Hall, Variety International's chairman and a friend
of Austin's who nominated him for this year's award.
Among the innovations credited to Austin is the invention
of in-the-canal hearing aids in the early 1980s and the introduction
in the 1970s of the now-standard 30-day trial period.
"I consider him one of the leaders in the field of amplification
and auditory rehabilitation," says Maurice Miller, professor
of audiology at New York University and an adviser to the Hearing
Loss Association of America. He wears two Starkey hearing aids.
"I cannot think of anybody in private practice or in academia
who has done more for this field than Bill Austin."
Opportunity knocks
Not bad for a man who isn't an audiologist and whose career
was accidental. Austin, the only child of a Georgia-Pacific
lumber trader father and a factory-working mother in Garibaldi,
Ore., left home at 19 in 1961 to enroll in the pre-med program
at the University of Minnesota. To pay tuition, he took a job
making ear molds for a hearing-aid dealer in Minneapolis.
Austin sensed his business opportunity as he watched customers
grow frustrated by the crude, bulky hearing devices as well
as inconsiderate treatment by the hearing-aid dealer for whom
he worked.
"After six months in Minnesota, I decided I wasn't going to
do medicine. I was going to do hearing," he says.
He left school to start a hearing-aid repair company and read
up on hearing-aid literature. He taught himself how the mechanisms
work.
By 1970, he had bought a failing hearing-aid firm, Starkey,
and in the next decade built it into the nation's largest. His
efforts to shrink hearing aids and to offer better customer
service led to commercial success. Nowadays, the hearing aids
he most often sells are about the size of a wad of gum and loaded
with complex digital circuitry he acknowledges he barely understands.
The scale of his philanthropic work is largely the result
of an epiphany. He says he was lying in bed in 1977 when he
had a moment of clarity: His calling was to help disadvantaged
people hear. "It happened in the blink of an eye," he says.
The Starkey Hearing Foundation, which had been established
in 1973 to help poor Americans with hearing disabilities, soon
went international. Over the decades, Austin has sent teams
of audiologists and hearing-aid technicians to more than 150
nations.
He goes, too, and says he's always moved by people he meets,
such as a Salvadoran hearing-disabled woman who was barred from
school and a Guatemalan woman who sold her only cow for the
trip to his clinic so her children could get hearing aids.
"Those are not particularly unusual stories," says Austin,
who always travels with his audiologist wife, Tani. "In Vietnam,
there are signs outside the places where these children are
warehoused that says 'The So-and-So Place for Defective Children.'
The children aren't defective; they're perfect. They just need
a little help."
The Reagan boost
In some countries, hearing loss is stigmatized. Here, he says,
it's the hearing aids that are stigmatized.
That's why Reagan's decision in 1983 to go public with his
hearing aids was a boon to audiology, and to Austin's company
in particular. Sales of Starkeys quadrupled in the month after
that news. Today, Starkey sells about 1 million hearing aids
a year through 30 factories worldwide.
Austin's office walls are lined with dozens of photos of celebrities,
many with inscriptions thanking him for his hearing aids and
his service.
But persuading people to wear hearing aids remains a challenge.
At Delores Hope's request, he tried to test Bob Hope's hearing
in the 1990s. The entertainer locked himself in a bedroom until
Austin left.
"He said, 'I can hear the applause, and that's all I need
to hear.' But he had terrible hearing and he missed so much,"
Austin says. "It isolated him. That's what hearing disability
does. And that's what I try to fix. To help people hear is to
connect people."
