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Audio-Centric Salesman: Hearing Aid Center: One's Loss is Another's Passion

Posted on: Wednesday, 8 February 2006, 09:01 CST

By Dania Akkad, The Monterey County Herald, Calif.

Feb. 8--Gary Gams doesn't even need to turn around to know you've arrived.

Open the glass door at the Salinas Hearing Aid Center, an apparatus lets out a sharp wail and there is Gams. A rosy-cheeked, thickset man in argyle socks, he is motioning to an empty chair in the center of his toy-filled office.

On Feb. 1, the convivial 55-year-old hearing aid dispenser from Prunedale opened his own shop on San Miguel Avenue, in a shopping center behind a bowling alley. The spot is just across South Main Street from the Valley Hearing Center where Gams had his first run-in with the hearing business.

It was the early 1980s. Gams had begun to lose his hearing and went into Valley Hearing Center to get help. He hit it off with the owner, Larry Solow, became a licensed hearing aid man, and worked at the center for 14 years.

"I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Larry," Gams said. "The goal was not to move here to hurt him."

Solow, an audiologist with eight years of university training, opened his practice in 1963. Despite their proximity, Solow said the two practices differ significantly since he has a more extensive medical background, whereas Gams is not an audiologist, but went through a two-year certification program to become a certified hearing aid dispenser and has a degree in audioprosthology.

"I can sell hearing aids. I can test you," said Gams. "I am a little more limited than (Solow) is."

The disarmingly funny Gams said he's a consummate salesman, hawking hot dogs and falafel as a child growing up in the Chicago area and later dealing in coupon books and newspaper ads in California.

"I was always fairly good at selling, but that gets old. This way," he said of his hearing aid business, "there was some selling involved, but I could help people at the same time and I know what they are going through."

Settling back into his swivel chair and listening to melodic Iranian music in his new office, he said, "Now, I am the show."

Gams said he gave up a comfortable life to start his own business, begging and borrowing money to get started. Still, there is no sense at his office of any deprivation or gravity.

Here, a slide show of animal paintings and cowboy scenes tick along his computer screen and a ceramic container holds a pencil with a piece of rubber dog poop on top. He calls this his Number Two pencil.

Inside a closet about two feet away is a collection of toys, including a Barbie doll signing "I love you" with her hand, a plastic chicken and a Frank Sinatra action figure, still in its box.

When Gams pulls out the electric-blue hearing aids from behind his ears, they tinkle and squeak like a harp dropped down a spiral staircase. These days, he said, hearing aids such as his come in neon colors and can even be set to work in concert with an iPod or a cell phone.

But fashion statement they are not.

Unlike the nerdy hipster-look and rhinestone frames of eyeglasses that have become popular solely as statements of style, hearing devices repel even folks who really need them, Gams said.

"Glasses used to be that way in the '30s and '40s," he said. "People called them 'Four-Eyes.' Now people wear them even when they don't need them."

Many of Gams' clients are hesitant to downright stubborn about having to correct their hearing. Some are sent to him by their spouses or children. Others wear their hearing aids only at Christmastime. And the truth is that Gams can never bring their hearing back to what it once was.

"It's very subjective," he said of one's hearing quality. "It's like Swiss cheese. I love it, you hate it and we're both right."

To qualm reluctant customers, Gams said his technique is to schmooze. The chair in the middle of the room which makes embarrassing sounds no matter how careful one plops down on it also helps break the ice.

"I like to think that the person in my chair is my mom and dad," he said.

After getting to know a customer, Gams will test for the softest sounds that client is able to hear. Because he is not an audiologist, he can only test people's hearing and sell devices, and must refer clients to a doctor if he spots anything unusual in their ears. He can also take customers inside their ear.

For the procedure, called a video otoscopy, Gams wields his auriscope gently and reveals a huge, shimmering ear drum on a 35-inch television. One time, he even found a bug in a woman's ear.

"She even commented that she heard noise a lot," he said.

Gams thinks that a pill will eventually be created that will grow hair in people's ear canals. When these tiny hairs are excited by vibrations, a nerve impulse is generated in the auditory nerve and is sent to the brain, which translates it as sound. Such pills could make his industry an anachronism.

Until then, Gams said he's happy to find his passion in what could only seem like a loss.

www.lhh.org/archives/hamuseum.htm

Dania Akkad can be reached at 753-6752 or dakkad@montereyherald.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Monterey County Herald, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Monterey County Herald (Monterey, Calif.)

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