BY RACHEL ROOF
This coming September, the Honeoye Falls optometrist, Dr. Barry T. Kissack, is celebrating his thirtieth anniversary in business. He began Four Corners Eyecare at the Honeoye Falls Main Street intersection, and thirty years later, it is still thriving.
Dr. Kissack’s career path started when he was nineteen and he received advice from his very own optometrist. After graduating from the Los Angeles College of Optometry, Dr. Kissack served in the medical core in the military during Vietnam, practiced optometry in New Mexico, and made contact lenses at Bausch and Lomb, a lens manufacturing site in Rochester. Later, after working at CooperVision, also in Rochester, he decided he loved the area and wanted to stay.
It is not obvious when first coming to the optometrist in Honeoye Falls that Dr. Kissack’s business has been around for thirty years, because the atmosphere of the place seems almost new. There is a friendly feeling to the place, and Dr. Kissack gives his patients the utmost attention. The hospitable mood is likely due to Dr. Kissack’s ardent passion for optometry. “I love it,” he says, when asked why he has stayed in the business for so long. “I like people, I’m glad I’m helping them.”
Thirty years of business would, of course, entail a myriad of strange stories. One such event took place many years ago when patients used to boil contact lenses rather than use solution. After boiling the contact, a tablet would be placed in the solution to clean it. One of Dr. Kissack’s patients had dirty lenses, so he asked her how she cleaned them. She responded by saying that she would boil the lenses, as directed, and then she would take the tablet, place it in her mouth, and swallow it. It is difficult to say how she expected this to clean her lenses through such a method.
Years later this is still a memorable and amusing story for Dr. Kissack.
As a passionate optometrist, Dr. Kissack has just one piece of advice for anyone searching for their own career: “You have to be sure that you’re going to love it twenty years from now.” Dr. Kissack took his time researching career options at his college’s library until he found the job that was right for him. The hard work proved itself useful, as his thirty year business has become a career he is genuinely passionate about.
