Melvin Couey doesn’t put on many airs.
His work was always blue-collar, the retired welder and plumber says. His spelling never was the best, he apologizes, showing a visitor a datebook where what really stands out are the number of charitable and church activities it contains.
His formula for success? Being deceptively, effectively direct.
“I’ve always found that if you come right out and ask, you can get a whole lot more than if you hint around,” Couey, 87, said recently during a chat in his sun-flooded Powder Springs home.
Asked and received, Couey has — over 36,000 times. That’s how many pairs of donated eyeglasses he’s collected as a member of the West Cobb Lions Club. Although by the time you finish reading this sentence, there’ll probably be a few more in the drop-off donor boxes Couey oversees as part of a worldwide vision program run by Lions Clubs International.
From the local water department office and Walmart to a beauty shop and even a couple of funeral homes, 13 locations in all act as temporary way stations for the hundreds of bifocals, horn rims and tortoiseshells that people simply have no use for anymore.
Whenever a box fills up, Couey, accompanied by his wife, Lois, heads out to collect the contents. He hands the glasses over to Lester Dean, president of the West Cobb chapter, who brings them to Atlanta, where they’re cleaned and examined by optometry students. Eventually, they make their way to one of the 17 eyeglass-recycling centers around the world run by the Lions, whom Helen Keller challenged to become “knights of the blind in the crusade against darkness” in 1925.
“We’ve probably been doing eyeglass collections for 20-some years,” Dane LaJoye of Lions Clubs International said of the program that examines eyes and distributes free glasses, predominantly in Third World countries. “We collect about 7 million pairs every year.”
Still, Couey’s efforts make for quite the, uh, spectacle.
“In terms of an individual collecting that many pairs, that’s a considerable feat,” LaJoye said. “He sounds so clever.”
Clever enough to have thought about asking for — and receiving — some 1,200 pairs of orphaned eyeglasses at two unclaimed baggage facilities run by the airlines in Alabama. And clever enough to have talked up the Lions long ago to an assistant principal at McEachern High School, where Couey was working as a plumber for the Cobb County School system after spending 20 years as a welder at Lockheed.
That assistant principal was Dean, who in 1977 joined the West Cobb Lions club that Couey had helped found in 1965.
“I joined the club and the next year they elected me president,” Dean laughed, perhaps only now appreciating what Couey helped get him into. “In fact, I’ve been president five times.”
Of course, one man’s clever is just another man’s vision of doing the right thing. Why has he worked so hard to improve the sight of people he’ll never lay eyes on himself? Couey fell silent.
“I wanted to help people,” the still solid-looking World War II Navy veteran finally responded with a slight catch in his throat. “I like helping people.”
All you had to do is come right out and ask him.
AJC Holiday Heroes 2010
For the second year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has selected a group of metro Atlanta residents to honor as Holiday Heroes, members of our community who, often at their own expense and without fanfare, do what they can to help others.
Thirteen winners were selected from among dozens of worthy nominees. Besides having their stories told in the AJC and on ajc.com, this year’s Heroes will also be featured on radio station B98.5 FM, and each will receive a $250 gift card donated by the Buckhead Life restaurant group.
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