The author, Roy Wesley, grew up working in the emerging contact lens industry of the 1950s in his father’s business, The Plastic Contact Lens Company (PCL) in Chicago. As a pre-teen, he did piecework stuffing rubber pads into contact lens cases by hand. As a teenager, he began cutting hard contact lenses on Briggs & Stratton lathes. Manual labor was not part of his skill set as his contact lens reject rate was higher than acceptable for the job. He learned about other aspects of the business and eventually became a member of the board of directors.
Besides being a PhD research scientist in cell and molecular biology and working at Pfizer and Fermalogic, Roy received his Doctor of Optometry degree from New England College of Optometry and then joined Wesley Jessen, the renamed PCL in the WJ Contact Lens Clinic. After the sale of WJ, he became president of the National Eye Research Foundation.
Following his father Newton K. Wesley’s death in 1991, Roy Wesley researched and wrote Invisible Vision as a memorial testament to his pioneering work. This is the story of a Japanese American born a US citizen to immigrant parents during the Great Depression. Besides the inherent discrimination of the times before and after World War II, he confronted impending blindness. He overcame it by developing new contact lenses that helped the vision of millions of people around the world including movie stars and professional athletes.
Past Publications: Roy Wesley Short Story, Sparkling Diamonds. Books in Progress: Lost Life, A Memoir of Incarceration. Past Presentations and Lectures.