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After a long and successful career in optometry, I. William Collins, OD ‘47, wants to help ensure future optometrists trained at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry at Salus University (PCO/Salus) have a leg up as they pursue that same level of success.
Dr. Collins recently established the I. William Collins OD, FAAO, Contact Lens Science Award, a scholarship that will be given to two PCO/Salus students. The award is designed for students who rotated through the Contact Lens track and showed exceptional case management skills, which includes the clinical examination, design, fitting and troubleshooting of specialty contact lenses.
“I’ve been very successful, not only in optometry but I had a side business related to optometry. Because of that, I think it’s only right of me to share it a little bit,” said Dr. Collins, 94, now retired and living in Sarasota, Florida, where he plays a lot of golf.
Dr. Collins was active during his years at PCO, serving as vice president of his class, as a member of the tennis and basketball teams, on the staffs of publications such at the Iris, the Pupil and the Review.
“Optometry has become a really vibrant profession compared to what it was when I practiced. It was very primitive,” he said. “The instrumentation today is something I couldn’t begin to know how to use.”
After graduating from PCO, Dr. Collins first worked for a businessman who sold eyeglasses and after a year, moved on to a private practice on South Street in Philadelphia for a very short time.
“There was no direct advertising permitted in the profession in those days. No professions were allowed to advertise, it was controlled nationally,” he said. “When I was practicing, at least for my first 15 years, advertising was frowned upon. In fact once after my name, I put ‘contact lens specialist’ in the phone book and the wrath of God came down on me. That was advertising.”
Dr. Collins eventually started his own practice in 1958 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. By the mid-1980s, he had became frustrated that the commercial eyeglass companies were receiving discounts that the smaller private practices couldn't get from manufacturers.
So he got 18 fellow optometrists together and started The Source Buying Group, which turned into a business that eventually would feature 800 members in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
Dr. Collins is a member of the American Optometric Association (AOA) and is a Diplomate in the American Academy of Optometry’s (AAO) Contact Lens Section.
He was an elected member of the PCO/Salus Board of Trustees in 1992 and became a board trustee emeritus in 2015. He served the College as a visiting clinical instructor and adjunct associate professor of optometry. In 1997, he received PCO’s Presidential Medal of Honor.
He eventually sold his Pottstown practice to his partner, James J. Suydam Jr., OD ‘84, in 1997, and then sold The Source Buying Group to another buying group in 1998, retiring with his wife Suzanne to Florida.
This isn’t the first time Dr. Collins and his wife have given back to PCO/Salus. The Pediatric and Binocular Vision Service at The Eye Institute of Salus University is named in the couple’s honor. Suzanne Collins passed away in 2008 after 52 years of marriage.
Rather than bequest funds in his will to PCO/Salus, Dr. Collins decided to establish the Contact Lens scholarship now rather than wait until after he was gone.
“I had several things bequested in my will and I figured I’ll do them now while I’ll still alive, and take them out of the will,” he said. One of his goals is to encourage others to give while they’re still alive. “It’s a nice feeling to be able to do that,” he said.
