Hackensack optometrist honored at White HouseTuesday October 2, 2012, 6:30 PM
BY HERB JACKSON
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
The Record
Hackensack optometrist Paul Berman was thrilled to be honored at the White House on Tuesday as a “Champion of Change” for creating a program that has helped nearly 100,000 Special Olympics athletes in 80 countries see better.
HERB JACKSON / STAFF
Hackensack optometrist Paul Berman was honored as a 'Champion of Change' at the White House Tuesday. But it doesn’t compare to the feeling he gets when he sees the effect the Opening Eyes program has on athletes.
“We’ve had people who saw birds for the first time,” Berman said in an interview. Many athletes gained new abilities, because problems caused by bad eyesight were blamed on their intellectual disability.
“There was a Canadian athlete, and his eyes were focused about three-and-a-half inches 3½ inches from his nose, and he ran track,” Berman said.
The runner told Berman he was able to run by “following the blur in front of me.”
“One of the happiest moments of my life was when he came back with the gold medal,” Berman said. “He won the race because for the first time he was able to see.”
Berman, a Hillsdale resident, suggested more than 20 years ago that the American Optometric Association approach Special Olympics about having volunteers examine their athletes.
An ad in a trade journal drew 16 optometrists who volunteered to pay their own way to the games in Minneapolis in 1991. They found that 37 percent of the athletes needed different glasses, and 18 percent had an undiagnosed eye health problem, about one third of which were serious.
“Twenty percent of these people had never had an eye examination,” Berman said at the White House ceremony, where he was one of 11 people honored for their work with Lions Club International, which now oversees Opening Eyes. “And it’s no different in the United States than it is in Uganda because these people are universally neglected. Urban, rural, rich, poor, it really doesn’t matter.”
Berman credited Sargent Shriver, the husband of Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver and chairman of the organization’s board, for helping to build the program after hearing about the findings from Minneapolis.
“He said, ‘Paul, tell me what we have to do to make persons with intellectual disabilities see better, and I don’t care how much it costs.’Ÿ” Berman said.
He has been to China six times, he said, and met Nelson Mandela when the Special Olympics Games were in South Africa. When the national Special Olympics games are held in New Jersey in 2014, Berman will be volunteering to oversee the entire health program.
Berman also said Lions Club International, with 1.35 million members worldwide, was invaluable. Some 5,000 lions have volunteered their time, as have 8,000 optometrists and ophthalmologists.
“A lot of them did it out of pity,” Berman said in the interview. “But once they see them, and that’s the beauty of Special Olympics, they see them compete, and they realize that this isn’t about pity, it’s really about acceptance.”
The Champions of Change program honors “ordinary Americans doing great work in their communities.”
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