About Us
All Florida Hearing Aid Center is Northwest Florida’s oldest hearing aid center. Established by the late Neil W. Dawkins in 1966, Neil started All Florida on the 3rd floor of the old Plaza Building at Town and Country Plaza. After 2 years in the Plaza Building, he acquired Pensacola Hearing Aid Center which had been located in the mall section of Town and Country Plaza since the late fifties and Neil relocated his business there.
At one time Town and Country Plaza was the center of attention in Pensacola. Many of you may remember Murphy’s, Gayfers, Grants, Auto-Lec, Gordon’s Jewlers, Plaza Toy, Delchamps and many other fine shops. All Florida Hearing stayed in the mall until the late seventies when needing more space, they moved next to Murphy’s at the other end of the plaza. When Gayfers closed, we became the oldest tenant in Town and Country Plaza. Reluctantly we were forced to relocate in November of 2004 after Hurricane Ivan flooded our office, equipment and files.
Fast forward to the recent past and we were never as successful as we were in our location in the medical park at 5528 Davis Highway next to American Carpets.
However, we have outgrown that office and moved into our new Super Center location at 2401 Langley Ave. behind Walgreens. We receive compliments every day about how nice, clean and quiet it is in our new location.
What separates us from our fellow hearing associates is experience. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. We have 3 licensed hearing aid specialists. Jon Lankford started with us in 1968; Theresa Dawkins became licensed with us in 1985 and Neil’s son Stephen Dawkins in 1988. Neil passed away 2 years ago. We’re still proud to be a family oriented business.
Many of our patients are the sons, daughters, even grandchildren of past patients. No local Hearing aid center even comes close to our 42 Years in business with the Same Name and Ownership!
We’ve seen and been a part of many innovations in the hearing aid business. When we first started in 1966, Body Models were very popular. Those instruments were the size of a deck of playing cards that you wore in your pocket with a long cord connecting to an ear mold. Later large behind-the-ear devices and models that attached to your eyeglasses became popular. In the early ’70s the all-in-the-ear hearing aids were invented and we fitted lots of them. In ’77 Zinc Air battery technology was invented, and we switched over to them. In 1982 we began fitting the new in-canal hearing aids.
1988 brought along the first computer programmable hearing aids. We invested over ten thousand dollars to be the first in the area to fit the new 2-channel 3M Memory Mate Programmable hearing aids. In 1993 we fitted our first of the then-new Completely in Canal hearing aids and in 1997 our first fully digital hearing instruments the Siemens Prisma.
Today we are proud to be on the cutting edge of Open Ear hearing instruments. In the last 3 years, we have seen the traditional ear-plug-type hearing aids going away. We fit very few traditional ear-plug-type hearing aids anymore. If you are thinking of investing in new hearing aids, you owe it to yourself to come in and try our Siemens Life open ear hearing aids. The fitting process is unique; you can try them and wear them home the same day. We all wear open ears ourselves.
Give us a call at 476-3644.