One family. Three generations. One rule.
Royal Palm Hearing Aid Center has been Boca Raton's family hearing practice since 1984, and the family has been in hearing care since 1964. Mel and Sondra Sorkowitz founded it. Their daughter Elissa Sorkowitz Lejeune leads it today. The rule has never changed: you are a patient here, not a transaction.
It began with the people he loved.
Mel Sorkowitz grew up around people he loved who could not hear well. His grandfather and his mother both had serious hearing loss, and Mel spent his childhood watching them get left out of the room. He went into hearing care because of them.
Late in life, with hearing loss himself and wearing his own hearing aids, he put it plainly:
"There is absolutely no reason for a person having to suffer from not hearing in this day and age."
The fight that changed the profession.
In 1970, the rules of his profession said the person who tested your hearing could not also fit your hearing aid. Diagnosis and treatment were supposed to stay separate, and patients were shuttled between a clinician and a retailer, with no one accountable for the whole journey. Mel believed that was exactly backward. At the most important moment, he thought, care was handed off to someone who knew the patient least.
So he wrote to his professional association and said so, in writing, knowing it broke their code of ethics.
"Throughout my short clinical career, I have always tried to operate under the principle that the patient is of utmost importance and is to be considered above all else."
"I would consider it an honor if someone from the Ethics Committee would pay me a visit."
They gave him a choice: stop, or resign. Given the choice between his professional association and his patients, he chose his patients. On June 23, 1970, his resignation was accepted, and it cost him for years. He never recanted it. Eight years later, the profession rewrote its code of ethics to match the model he had been practicing all along.
Recognition came, if slowly. The Audiology Foundation of America gave him its Professional Leadership Award for his "perseverance and strength as a pioneer in hearing aid dispensing," his university named him to its Wall of Honor, and the industry's own journal, which had once called his model unethical, came to look back on him as one of the field's pioneers.
His daughter Elissa, who now runs the practice, wrote the ending herself:
"Long before the profession caught up, Melvin Sorkowitz was already there."
Why Boca.
After Philadelphia came the Colorado years, when the family built hearing instruments as well as fitting them. Then they lost it, to forces beyond their control. Mel and Sondra came to Boca Raton in 1984 to start again, in a place with no shortage of people who needed hearing care.
What restarted them was a single act of care. Mel solved a hard case for an older woman other offices could not help. She turned out to be a local banker's mother-in-law, and the grateful banker financed the practice that grew into Royal Palm. One patient, helped properly, is the reason there was a practice at all.
Mel's words for it: "casting your bread upon the waters."
He did not do it alone.
Sondra Sorkowitz ran the business for decades so Mel could stay with patients, and she had a mission of her own: widening access to hearing. She founded her own California company and spent years getting assistive listening technology into places that had never had it, from airline cabins to theater seats.
Mel and Sondra built the practice together, and their daughter runs it now.
The daughter they trained, and the rule she added.
Elissa joined the practice in 1994, worked side by side with her parents for thirty years, and runs it today. She grew up inside the work: her first job was in her father's factory, and as a girl she played in the anechoic chambers where the hearing instruments were tested.
Mel never asked her to copy his path. He asked her to learn every manufacturer and every technology, so she could always recommend what was best for the person in the chair, loyal to no brand, only to the patient.
Then Elissa added a rule of her own: the relationship does not end at the sale, it starts there. Patients are seen at least every three months, follow-up care never carries a charge, and nobody is ever surprised by a bill. Today Elissa's sons help steward the practice and its future. Three generations have believed the same thing about the work: hearing well can change a person's life.
Two generations at the counter: Sondra, Elissa, and Mel.
"Our family has always been somewhat iconoclastic about societal norms and dogma, and, for the most part, we have all made positive contributions to our world in our endeavors in 'doing the right thing.'"Mel Sorkowitz, in his own writing
From the family archive.
Mel passed in 2025, at 86. He wrote all his life, and kept nearly everything. Elissa is gathering his letters, writings, and photographs into the Melvin Sorkowitz Archive, and sharing them here over time. A good place to start: some throwback TV ads featuring the family.