Utah’s world-class eye center, and the man who built it

Sometime between now and June — the exact date is yet to be determined — Randy Olson will take down the framed honors hanging on the walls of his fifth floor office, soak in one final look at the panoramic view of the Salt Lake Valley below, and walk away from the John A. Moran Eye Center to join the ranks of the newly retired.

He’ll be 78 in April, so no one’s suggesting this is premature, but, still, no one’s entirely sure the building will remain standing once he’s gone.

Few, if any, institutions in the state are as entwined with one person as the Moran Eye Center is with Dr. Randall J Olson. Would it be there without him? Or would it still be a parking lot? And would Utah be home to one of the greatest eye care centers in the world?

Probably not.

“I hope you’ve got good equity in your house because I’m sure as heck not paying for it.”

That’s how the chair of surgery at the University of Utah Medical Center responded when Olson asked if he could add a third ophthalmologist to the staff. Only the chair didn’t say heck.

This wasn’t ancient history. This was the fall of 1979. A few months earlier, Olson, 32 years old and six years removed from graduating from the U. of U. Medical School, had arrived in Salt Lake to head up the hospital’s ophthalmology division. Although “head up” is being generous, as is “division.” Olson was the only ophthalmologist.

It had taken some hard talking for him just to get the job, because the med center was thinking seriously about not replacing Olson’s predecessor, who had departed for greener pastures. Eye care at the U. was losing money, a perennial drain on the system. They reluctantly gave Olson an $80,000 loan for startup operational expenses and an office so tiny it had a pocket door just so a desk could fit inside.

Yet here he was, a few months later, threat of losing his house notwithstanding, wanting to triple the faculty when they couldn’t even afford more staff.

He talked a former med school intern named Mano Swartz to hire on for below-market pay, and the first thing the two of them did was take a road trip. They loaded into Swartz’s car, a Chevy Monte Carlo, turned up the volume on the eight-track, stayed at the cheapest motels they could find and visited ophthalmologists throughout northern Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and parts of Montana.

Their message was a simple one: refer your patients to us, and they’ll get excellent care.

If the gamble hadn’t worked, you wouldn’t be reading this.

But as it turned out, word of mouth, and the doctors’ power of persuasion, proved to be a momentum turner. By the end of that first fiscal year, in June of 1980, the $80K loan was paid back and ophthalmology at the U. was in the black.

Solvency meant survival, and that meant Olson could begin to concentrate on his long-range dream: to bring world-class eye care to the Intermountain West, something similar to the facilities he’d seen while training at UCLA and LSU.

It would take volumes to detail all that’s happened in the decades since to make the dream come true — something Dr. Olson says he plans to tackle when he writes his memoirs — but suffice it to say the history is full of Olson being told “no” and him proving to be pathologically incapable of hearing it. That and generous people appearing on the scene just when they were most needed.

Most significant of these donors was John Arthur Moran, a successful investment banker and devoted University of Utah graduate (Class of 1954) who was introduced to Olson by former university president Chase Peterson.

Olson remembers what would prove to be a most auspicious event:

“We met in the president’s office. Chase was a consummate fundraiser. We had a dog and pony show for John, after which John said, ‘I like it, I want to be involved. What do you need?’ I had no idea what to say and Chase just came up with a number. He said, ‘John, we need $3 million.’ John said, ‘Can you do what you need to do to get this center up and going?’ and Chase said, ‘yes, we can,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I’m not sure if we can or not.’

“Then John asked if we would like that in installments or one single donation. Chase said, ‘one single donation,’ John said ‘OK,’ and just like that we were off and running. We broke ground in 1991.”

The first John A. Moran Eye Center, built for $17 million thanks to other donors who joined Moran, opened in 1993, a gleaming new 85,000 square foot building next to the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

In less than a decade it was too small.

Again, Moran stepped up, this time agreeing to donate $18 million toward a bigger headquarters. The donations from the old building were put back into the new one, while the Sam Skaggs and Ezekiel R. Dumke families contributed an additional $10 million each to top off the fundraising. In 2003 construction began in a parking lot south of Primary Children’s Hospital on the second John A. Moran Eye Center.

Since then, an additional 11 remote clinics have been added, along with an outreach program that provides humanitarian eye care aid throughout the world.

Today, the Moran is considered among the world’s top eye care institutions. Its researchers and clinicians are perennials on The Ophthalmologist magazine’s Power List ranking of the 100 most influential people in the industry. A business that had two employees and $180,000 net revenue in its first year now has more than 500 employees and a yearly net revenue of $90 million. It is incalculable how many eye patients have been helped in the past 46 years, just as it is incalculable to compute how much the Moran Eye Center means to the Intermountain West.

All traced back to the vision of one man.

Postscript: As the final day approaches, and the University of Utah wraps up its nationwide search for his successor as CEO, no one is surprised that Olson is using his pending retirement as a vehicle to — what else — raise money.

Brochures with his smiling face on the cover have been mailed to prospective donors near and far, hailing “a visionary” and highlighting the remarkable story of Randall J Olson and the Moran Eye Center.

“I’m trying to see that there’s a nice buffer for my successor,” says the soon to be retired ophthalmologist. “There’s so much still we want to do, so much more to accomplish.” Then, with a smile in his eye he adds, “and you know, we are running out of space.”