Recent transplant brings prosthetic eye business to Southwest Florida

About 30 years ago — Morton Tadder doesn't remember the year exactly — Ray Peters made him a perfect eye to replace the one doctors had to remove.

Tadder had fought off a robber at his home. During the struggle, the man shot him, sending a bullet behind his left eye and through the roof of his mouth. He spit out the bullet and would recover completely, but the attack destroyed one optical nerve and left him blind in the left eye. The eye would soon have to be removed, and with a career in photography, Tadder didn't want clients and potential clients to know he didn't have full vision.

Ray Peters holds some of the artificial eyes that he has made in his career as a master ocular prosthetist. Peters retired to Florida but recently returned to the work he loves. Cameron Gillie/Staff

After the eye was removed, Tadder was referred to Peters, a master prosthetic eye maker who then worked in the Baltimore area. Peters made a perfect partner to the photographer's remaining blue eye.

"After I had the eye replaced, very, very few people have ever realized that it is a prosthesis," Tadder said. "If I don't tell them, they don't know."

Peters, now a resident of North Naples, loves to hear stories of how his handmade eyes were mistaken for real.

"Most artists want their work noticed," Peters says. "I want my work to be so good nobody ever recognizes it."

Peters, 73, is a leader in the very small world of prosthetic eye makers. According to the American Society of Ocularists, the only organization of prosthetic eye makers in the United States, there are about 120 people in the United States and Canada certified to make prosthetic eyes. Most of those are clustered around major cities. Until Peters joined with Eyetopian Optical at The Promenade in Bonita Springs, Southwest Florida had none.

There are no schools that teach eye making. Anyone interested must find a practicing master prosthetist and convince that person to take on an apprentice. There are no textbooks on the subject, though Peters has written a manual that he hopes will become a teaching tool to train more dental technicians to make prosthetic eyes in rural areas and poor countries. Peters said he would like to open the first school for occultists in the country here in Southwest Florida.

He is recognized as one of the best. Robert A. Thomas, a former president of American Society of Ocultists, was trained by Peters beginning in 1959.

"I wished I knew what he knew," Thomas said.

Thomas and Peters both started as dental technicians. The process of shaping eyes is similar to making dentures, involving the same materials and similar shaping and sculpting techniques.

Peters' involvement in the world of replacement eyes began shortly after World War II.

In 1948, Germany stopped shipping the fine artesian glass used to make artificial eyes. With high demand created by World War II, the U.S. government joined with the private sector to study techniques for fashioning prosthetic eyes from acrylic. Peters, a 19-year-old member of the Navy dental corps, was part of the pilot program. He continued to make custom eyes for patients for 48 years in Baltimore before leaving his practice when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Doctors made quick work of the cancer, but not before Peters had scheduled his retirement.

"I thought, if this cancer comes back, I won't be any good to anybody," Peters said. "I was a caretaker to 1,400 cases when I retired. That last day, walking out of the office felt like I was losing my first child."

Peters estimates that he took care of up to 20,000 patients while in Baltimore. Doctors from Johns Hopkins University would refer patients to him and word of mouth brought cases from all over the world.

There were Hungarian diplomats and Russian diplomats. Seven Egyptians and five Israelis from the 1978 war between the two countries came to his Eye Restoration Clinic. A member of the Saudi royal family came to his clinic once. He fitted the Nigerian governor's son for a prosthetic when he came to the United States to attend Harvard. He worked with a German beauty queen who lost her eye to a punch from her husband. He even fitted an appaloosa dressage horse that had lost both eyes to a bacterial infection and glaucoma with a pair of dark-brown prosthetics that allowed the horse to return to competition.

In 1983, Peters read a newspaper account of Jimmy Trumpe, a 5-year-old boy who had lost his eye to a BB gun while bird hunting. The child, who was from a poor family from Maryland's eastern shore, asked a mall Santa Claus to bring him an eye for Christmas. The local Lions club picked up the cause and Peters made the eye for free. As Trumpe grew, Peters made two more.

The Baltimore Sun published the story on Christmas Eve. "I'll make an eye for this boy as a Christmas gift," Peters told the newspaper. "I'm only sorry I can't give this boy sight."

Peters keeps a framed copy of the story in his home studio. Over the years he lost track of Jimmy, but the boy remains one of the memories of his profession. It was the sort of connection he missed when he retired. Peters said he would take two or three charity cases each month. Each case cost $1,500 to $3,500.

"I was a caretaker to a lot of people when I retired," Peters said. "When you retire, you lose that identity."

Peters' wife, Susan, helped her husband's decision to return to work in Southwest Florida.

"Retirement was traumatic for him," Susan said. "When he retired, he thought he was going to like it. But he missed all of his patients. He missed being a caretaker. He missed all the hugs and the kisses and everything he used to get from the patients. It was just very, very gratifying to him. I joke with him that I hug him and tell him he's wonderful and kiss him — but I don't do it every day."

Peters' main hobby, painting, reflects his career. The Peterses' home is filled with his paintings. There's a lion with a full mane walking toward the observer. On a wall facing the front door hangs a scene from Venice, Italy, where the couple spent a month of his five-year retirement.

On an easel in his studio, Peters is working on a pair of cheetahs. One is an adult, the other a cub. Both are staring toward whoever looks at them. In the middle of each reddish eye is a white dot of light. The same dot is in the eyes of a painting of a young clown with teary big blue eyes.

"That white dot is reflected light," Peters explains. "It's in everyone's eyes. The eyes curve and reflect any light source, see. It gives it a three-dimensional look."

If an artificial eye is done right, and the ones Peters creates are, they reflect that light.

"All artists are copyists," Peters says. "They copy God's work. They may paint something original, but they're copying God's work. They may copy the human form."

Peters copies eyes and tries to make perfect replicas. He uses tiny red threads to re-create the blood vessels. A palette of paints takes care of the colors. A complex surgery done by an ophthalmologist reattaches the muscles to a piece of coral in the back of the eye. Once completed, the ocular implant looks and moves as naturally as the real eye.

"My purpose in my business was to make people whole both physiologically and psychologically," Peters said. "Seventy five percent of it was to readjust people psychologically. Only 25 percent was physiological. It's a traumatic thing losing an eye."

Peters once worked with a teen-age girl named Leticia who faced regular taunts in her tough neighborhood after losing her right eye. She had joined a gang and combed her hair to cover the lost eye.

"I told her, 'I'll help you if you help me,' " Peters said. "'If I make you an eye and you look beautiful, you'll pull your hair away from your eyes and you'll throw away those gang colors. You'll go to school and be a good girl.'"

He did and she complied. She went to school and on to college. Peters says those troubled kids tugged on his emotions the most. The memories cause him to pull his glasses off his face and wipe his eyes. His nose reddens slightly.

"Any human being that has a deformity of some sort, it becomes a focal point for ridicule," Peters said. "Kids can be the cruelest. They have to defend themselves. A lot of times these kids are from areas where they had to fight to defend themselves. Once we got rid of this deformity, they didn't have to defend themselves any more."

For his patients, Peters' kindness is legendary. His wife recalled how he would bring waiting patients into the room with him and whoever he was working with at the time to help put them at ease.

Tadder, the photographer who lost his eye to an attacker's gunshot, remembers Peters' compassion when he lost his eye. Patients struggle with insecurity.

"He had a lot of compassion," Tadder said. "That's what I think you find about that guy. It's such a tragic thing for somebody to lose an eye. You get a prosthesis and you look at it and you think that something is wrong. It's not right. But as you get out in public, it's so good, people don't know unless you tell them about it. I remember I was out with a lady once and she said, 'You have the most gorgeous blue eyes.' That was funny."