Our Inspiration: Dr. Monte Greenawalt

The life story of Dr. Monte Greenawalt is one of faith, love and service. His story of success is remarkable not because of what he achieved, but how he chose to turn adversity into opportunity time and time again. The speed bumps he hit in life only fueled him to work harder and focus on helping other people.

Born in 1923 in Dubuque, Iowa, as the first son of Harry and Dorothy Greenawalt, Dr. Greenawalt was a child of the Great Depression. He found business success early in life growing and selling vegetables in his neighborhood. He told Transitions, a publication of New York Chiropractic College, that “Everyone was poor, but we didn’t know it.”

During World War II, Dr. Greenawalt signed up for the military, which meant he had to go through a series of examinations and physicals to go to war overseas. During this process, he received some bad inoculations that killed about 150 people and left Dr. Greenawalt paralyzed. He was forced to lie in an iron lung for six months.

Doctors thought that Dr. Greenawalt would live the rest of his life as a paraplegic, but his mother was determined not to accept this news and took him to a chiropractor. “They carried him in and he walked out,” his mother said of the treatment.

Going through this experience, Dr. Greenawalt decided then that he wanted to become a chiropractor. Upon graduating from Lincoln Chiropractic College in 1948, he started his practice in the basement of a bank in Dubuque. Despite initial growing pains, Dr. Greenawalt marched forward. As his practice grew, he had many patients coming to him with foot problems and their adjustments not holding for long. He would send patients to a podiatrist, but his patients’ adjustments were still not holding.

It was then that he designed an instrument to take 16 measurements of the feet. Through trial and error he discovered that he had to support all three arches of the foot to have optimal results. His patients began to feel better, results improved, patients' adjustments held longer and, in 1952, Foot Levelers, Inc. was born in Dubuque.

Today, Foot Levelers is headquartered in Roanoke, Va., and thousands of chiropractors use Foot Levelers. More than a million individually designed Stabilizing Orthotics have been made for patients around the world. Foot Levelers holds six U.S. and foreign patents for spinal/pelvic stabilization and proper cervical alignment.

Dr. Greenawalt died in 2007 at age 84. He was a member of the American College of Chiropractic Orthopedics and received many awards and honors, including:

• 1996: Northwestern College of Chiropractic named its new library “The Greenawalt Library” in honor of Dr. Greenawalt and his son, Kent, current Foot Levelers’ president.
• 1998: Named “Person of the Year” by Chiropractic Economics magazine.
• 2000: Named Fellow of the American College of Chiropractic, in honor of his outstanding commitment to the chiropractic profession.
• 2000: Received a Fellowship in the Palmer Academy of Chiropractic in recognition of his outstanding service to Palmer College and the chiropractic profession.
• 2001: Received the American Chiropractic Association’s Humanitarian of the Year Award.

Dr. Greenawalt was a strong financial supporter of the chiropractic profession, its associations and colleges. He constantly urged doctors of chiropractic to actively support the growth and development of their profession. His legacy lives on with the Monte H. Greenawalt Foundation, which has donated millions of dollars to help patients through chiropractic care.

Dr. Terry R. Yochum, author of Essentials of Skeletal Radiology, said Dr. Greenawalt had “a God-given business sense.”

“There is a law in this universe that works – give and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given unto you. I believed it and it worked,” Dr. Greenawalt once wrote in Success Express, a Foot Levelers publication.

“Realize that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and no one ever planted a seed and harvested the crop in the morning.”