The Ocularist

Danz once made Elizabeth Taylor-like eyes, two lavender irises that still make him smile. He made an eye for an ex-con who lost one of his own jumping from a second-story balcony during a foiled burglary. Danz has made eyes for show horses and police dogs. But eye trauma is his biggest source of business. He replaces eyes lost to BB guns, to bows and arrows, to sticks, rocks, scissors, falls, trips, tree branches, automobile accidents, baseball bats, knives, guns and screwdrivers. And, of course, cancer. He replaces eyes for some 50 children a year. About three to five eyes a week for the last 35 years. He has made tens of thousands of eyes.

Not one of these eyes can see. Danz is not a doctor. He doesn't cure blindness. His craft is to restore a damaged face, wedding science and art to re-create a window to the soul, even if the window lets in no light.

"He has a wonderful eye for precision," says 90-year-old client Gerda Cohn of Burlingame, whose left brown eye was lost to glaucoma.

Each eye is custom-made. When a client comes to his office, Danz makes an impression of his or her eye socket with the same materials a dentist uses to take impressions of teeth. He then makes a model from the mold using acrylic plastic. The iris, the pupil and the whites of the eye are hand-painted in oils onto the acrylic prosthesis. To create the appearance of blood vessels, Danz painstakingly separates the strands of a single red silk thread with a pair of tweezers, then cements them individually to the whites of the artificial eye, imitating natural patterns.

If his client has one good eye, Danz studies it. Makes a match.

Danz grew up watching his dad, Gottlieb Theodore Danz II, use a similarly detailed process, but he made artificial eyes out of glass in the method of the Lauscha craftsmen. In 1915, at the age of 10, his father immigrated to New York. During World War II, he switched to making acrylic eyes when it became difficult to get German glass. Danz still remembers his father throwing early acrylic eyes against his office wall to demonstrate their indestructibility to his clients. Willie was sent to Lauscha as a teenage apprentice. The master eye makers taught him their secrets--how to heat a tube of glass on one end until a ball forms, then use various colors of glass like paintbrushes to imitate the natural colors of the eye. He returned to America to start his trade, eventually moving to Oakland and then San Francisco.

Last summer Danz made a trip to Lauscha. He visited a glass factory, marveled at the antique glass eyes in the glass museum, saw the church where his grandfather was baptized and met another artificial eye maker, a distant cousin.

"I love the sense of history," Danz says. And he loves his job. He loves perfecting the parts. He loves making clients look whole again. Clients such as 78-year-old Harry Jarrett, who came to Danz with a gaping hole where his right blue eye used to be. Melanoma the culprit.

Danz slipped in the artificial blue eye. "Oh my goodness!" gasped his wife, Lorene, as Jarrett stared hard in a hand-held mirror, amazed and whole once again.