Founder Encourages People to Discover
Rita Pynoos remembers the first big Discovery Eye Foundation (DEF) event. In 1970, the organization had just started as the Discovery Fund for Eye Research, with a mission to fund research into eye diseases. Their first event was held on the main floor of the Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles. Wanting to include everyone they could, Pynoos and her late husband, Morris, “went all over LA to get people together from all walks of life — from the richest to the one on welfare,” the nonagenarian recalls.
“I wanted people to discover,” she says. “The first thing they discovered was the exquisite building and Bullocks Wilshire,” which is what she told the head of the store to get him to donate the space. “I wanted all the money to go to Discovery, so I made sure all the expenses were donated. We made more than $20,000 that night, which was a lot of money back then.”
It wasn’t Pynoos’ first philanthropic rodeo. “Everybody in the family does service work,” she says. “It goes way back — my mother, my mother’s mother. I remember my mother took care of immigrants. She would get donor families to give $5 a week each to support an immigrant family. She’d get five families to be a group to care for this family for a year, and another group to take care of another family. $25 was a lot of money in those days. It helped them get their start.”
Pynoos’ own life is filled with charity work. “I volunteered my whole life in one project or another,” she says. “During the war years, I was with the Red Cross as head of camp and hospitals. I did whatever the patients and soldiers needed.” She recalls organizing “cake days” once a week at the veterans’ hospital at Sepulveda and Wilshire in Los Angeles: “During the war, things were short, and butter and sugar were rationed. I got people to donate their rations and area bakeries to donate cakes. We’d take the Red Cross station wagons on routes to pick up cakes and take them to the hospital. How they loved those sweets, those soldiers!”
Pynoos always went where she saw a need, from working with veterans through the Red Cross to caring for children at the Vista Del Mar children’s home. All the while, she was raising her own two sons, Jon and Robert. It was when Jon was diagnosed with keratoconus (KC) during college that her attention turned to eye disease. She and Morris, her husband of 62 years, founded DEF to help fund the research being conducted on KC and other diseases by ophthalmologists in Los Angeles. They even recruited Dr. Anthony Nesburn from Harvard as DEF’s medical director.
On the 47th anniversary of the organization, Pynoos says: “Discovery was one of my pet things, and I saw it grow. At the beginning, nobody even knew the word keratoconus. We made people conscious of keratoconus and other diseases. Research money is very hard to come by. But that’s how everything is discovered.”