Boxes among us: Lions collect eyeglasses

HURLEY - The Hurley Lions Club, with 40 to 50 members, is active in providing eyeglasses to the second and third world.

To do this, the club maintains an old mailbox it painted purple and stationed in Giovanoni's store for people to drop off old eyeglasses. Smaller containers are stationed around the area for collection at other locations, including some eye doctor offices.

Dave Traczyk, a Lions Club member since 1979, said each club decides which projects to align itself with. The Hurley club elected to have one of its focus areas be sight conservation. One of the early members in the club was Dr. Ted Lepore, a retired ophthalmologist, so it was a natural fit with him.

The collected glasses, usually around 100 to 200 pair per year, are taken to the Rosholt Eyeglasses Recycling Center, which serves much of the Midwest, according to Traczyk.

Rosholt officials claim more than 800,000 pairs of glasses are processed annually.

Locally, Lion members manage the area boxes through the year, checking and emptying the contents, before the club delivers the glasses to Rosholt for further delivery worldwide.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 157 million people without access to eye care could easily have corrected vision with used, yet useable, glasses. The lack of proper vision, WHO claims, "Denies children and adults opportunities for education, employment, and a better quality of life."

The local club takes eyesight serious. The club also sponsors Leader Dogs for the blind. At one point, according to Traczyk, Hurley led the state of Wisconsin in sponsored seeing eye dogs, with 10 to 12 aiding three local blind people.

The Hurley chapter paid for the blind to stay in Rochester, where the dogs are trained, so the new dog owner can be molded to fit the dog. Dogs do not live as long as their human partners, so a single person can have a number of dogs over his lifetime.

According to Traczyk, the human has to change and conform to the dog, not the other way around. After returning home with the dog, the Lions Club continues paying for the dog's care and feeding for the life of each dog.

Currently, the club is not sponsoring any dogs and it has been around 15 years since it last had a dog.

Traczyk said Lions Club members used to stand at the intersection in Hurley and sell pins to generate revenue for the club, before the police outlawed the practice. One day, while selling pins in the street, a man came through and bought a pin for $5, a good sum for the inexpensive pins. The gentleman asked that a receipt be mailed to him for his records. Traczyk said he returned to his office that evening and wrote a letter and sent it to the man as requested.

A few months later, the Lions Club received a check for $25,000. The man, unbeknownst to the Lions Club, was blind and being chauffeured to the airport so he could die with his family. Before dying, he amended his last will and testament to include the Hurley Lions Club. That one man's giant donation funded much of the club's efforts for many years.

Lions Clubs International is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The secular, non-political service organization has more than 46,000 clubs and 1.4 million members in 200 countries around the world.

Nearly a million glasses are sent to the developing world through 18 different certified recycling centers. Hurley's Lions Club is doing its part to spread better vision, in part with the use of a big purple box.

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Editor's note: This article is part of a series of articles on the different types of collection boxes around town. From mailboxes to surplus drug collection boxes, to name a few, they help citizens live better.