Contact lens researcher Lee Wesley, held as a child in WWII camp for Japanese Americans, has died at 78

Lee Wesley and his wife Vicki Granacki, seen at their North Side home, were celebrated art collectors. | Virginia B. Van Alyea / Chicago Gallery News

Lee Wesley spent his toddler years surrounded by watch towers and barbed wire in the Idaho desert.

Even though he and his parents were born in the United States, his Portland, Oregon, family was among more than 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to World War II internment camps.

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, racism flared, and widespread paranoia about espionage divided national loyalties. The U.S. government ordered people of Japanese heritage on the West Coast to be held in “relocation centers.”

When he and his family finally were granted permission to leave the Minidoka camp in southern Idaho, they joined many former internees who came to Chicago seeking a fresh start.

Lee Wesley, born Lee Uyesugi, playing at Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. His family was imprisoned in one of the camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were held in World War II.

He graduated from Senn High School and got an engineering degree from the University of Michigan, an MBA from the University of Chicago and a doctor of ministry degree from Chicago Theological Seminary.

For years, Mr. Wesley headed research at Wesley-Jessen, the Chicago company cofounded by his father, optometry pioneer Newton K. Wesley, who helped make the city a center of contact lens development.

“I worked with a team of researchers and developed a computerized method of fitting contact lenses and the company’s first soft lens, which later became the DuraSoft lens,” Lee Wesley once told his college fraternity, Delta Chi.

When Wesley-Jessen was sold in 1980 to Schering-Plough Corp., he became president of the Dr. Newton K. Wesley Foundation Fund, overseeing investments, scholarships, grants for vision research and preservation of the history of the contact lens and Wesley-Jessen.

Lee Wesley and Vicki Granacki on their wedding day in 1977.

In 1977, on what he called “the happiest day of my life,” he married a fellow Chicagoan, Victoria Granacki, a third-generation Polish American.

Toward the end of his life, when staffers at Illinois Masonic Hospital asked him the secret to their long marriage, he’d say, “I’m her Polish prince.”

Mr. Wesley died Nov. 28 of pulmonary fibrosis, according to his wife. He was 78.

They became noted collectors of Chicago imagist art, including works by Ed Paschke, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt and Roger Brown.

He was born Newton Lee Uyesugi in Portland. His middle name — which he used instead of Newton — was for Harry Lee Fording, a founder of what’s now the Pacific University College of Optometry. His father was educated there and, with a partner, bought the college in 1940 for $5,000, according to the Oregon Encyclopedia.

But a few days before his first birthday, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His father and mother Cecilia Sasaki Uyesugi feared there would be repercussions for Japanese Americans, even a “third-generation” sansei like Lee. When relocation began, his dad had to abandon the optometry college he’d purchased.

His mother gave birth to his brother Roy a few days before the February 1942 internment order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “They allowed her three days to recover in the hospital” before she had to report to a Portland processing center that was set up at a livestock exposition site, Roy Wesley said.

“There were flies and all the manure was still down there,” he said. They were held there for months before being sent to Minidoka, Idaho.

When their father learned Quaker colleges were mobilizing to get students out of the internment camps, he enrolled at Earlham College in Indiana to try to complete the coursework to get a medical degree “so he could provide better for his family,” Roy Wesley said.

But when he went to say goodbye to little Lee, he almost faltered. Lee “was crying for him and didn’t want Dad to leave,” his brother said. “It broke my dad’s heart.”

Lee and Roy Wesley as child internees in the Minidoka camp in the high desert of Idaho.

They didn’t see their father again for two and a half years. Only when Cecilia and the boys were granted permission to leave Minidoka did they reunite. “We didn’t recognize him,” Roy Wesley said.

At Earlham, their father changed the family surname to Wesley, reasoning that “it was too hard for his patients to pronounce or find his name in the phone book,” according to Roy Wesley.

Newton K. Uyesugi’s parents did not approve. “His dad said, ‘It is an old Samurai name — why do you want to change it?’ ”

While the Wesley boys were in Minidoka, their father landed a job as a teacher at what would become the Illinois College of Optometry. And Newton K. Wesley researched his own eye disease, keratoconus.

“He was an amazing pioneer in contact lens development,” said Mark Colip, president of the Illinois College of Optometry.

He helped develop rigid plastic contacts that fit over the cornea, rather than old versions that covered the entire surface of the eye. They were more comfortable and slowed the progression of his eye malady, Colip said.

After internment, the Wesley family — parents Cecilia and Newton and sons Roy and Lee — settled in Chicago.

In 1949, he and a partner, optometrist George Jessen, founded Wesley-Jessen, which is now part of Alcon. Their company developed some of the first bifocal contact lenses and tinted lenses, and they were credited with popularizing the term “contact lens,” according to Alcon.

The family settled in Chicago, living in a greystone on Wilson Avenue when Uptown was filled with bars and what then were called girlie shows.

The Wesley boys went to Stewart grade school, where their status as patrol captains netted them free passes to cowboy movies at the old Lakeside Theatre, 4730 N. Sheridan Rd. They went sledding on Cricket Hill and studied judo with Masato and Vince Tamura at the Jiu-Jitsu Institute downtown.

During the early days of the Civil Rights era, Mr. Wesley took a bus to Selma, Alabama, to join in protests.

“We talked about the current things going on and targeting Muslims only for their faith,” his wife said. “He was targeted also.”

Lee Wesley with his children Monica and Matthew and grandchildren Lauren and Luke.

He enjoyed taking filmmaking and poetry classes. He played tennis at the McFetridge Sports Center and recently scored a hole–in–one at Chicago’s Robert A. Black golf course.

As adults, Lee Wesley (left) and Roy Wesley returned to the Minidoka camp where they and other Japanese Americans were held during World War II.

In addition to his wife and brother, Mr. Wesley is survived by his daughter Monica, son Matthew and two grandchildren. After the death of his mother Cecilia, his father married his second wife, Sandra. She also survives Mr. Wesley, along with his siblings from that marriage: Morgan, Shona and Taylor Wesley, Justine Altman and Jenna Williams.

Visitation is planned from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Dec. 13 at Cooney Funeral Home, 3918 W. Irving Park Rd., with a funeral mass at 10 a.m. Dec. 14 at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, 708 W. Belmont. Burial will be at St. Adalbert Cemetery in Niles.

This is the letter Lee Wesley’s mother wrote, appealing to get her family released from the U.S. government’s World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans in Minidoka, Idaho. At the right is the identification of the barracks where the family was held — number 31, Section 5A — and Hunt, Idaho, the closest town to the desert incarceration camp.

Lee Wesley and his wife Vicki Granacki at the wedding of their daughter Monica to Robert Westerholm. (From left) Their son Matthew stands next to his wife Sara and the Wesley grandchildren, Lauren and Luke.