Hindsight_55_2_no bleed_FINAL.pdf


HINDSIGHT: Journal of Optometry History 43

30 YEARS OF THANK YOUS
David A. Goss, O.D., PhD

Emeritus Professor of Optometry 

Indiana University

dgoss@indiana.edu

10.14434/hindsight.v55i2.40822

We are fortunate to have someone as 
capable and dedicated as Jennifer Reilly 
take over as editor of Hindsight. I am 
pleased to transition to a contributing 
editor position after serving as editor for 
30 years. There are many people to thank 
for their encouragement and assistance 
over those years.

First and foremost, I thank Henry 
Hofstetter for his confidence in me to edit 
the publication he started in 1970, for his 
inspiration, and for his excellent writings 
on optometry history that I have quoted 
on so many occasions.1,2  

The Optometric Historical Society (OHS) 
leadership has been very supportive of 
Hindsight. The OHS presidents/committee 
chairs during my years as editor have 
been Drs. Chuck Haine, Walter Chase, 
Doug Penisten, Jay Enoch, Melvin 
Wolfberg, Irving Bennett, John Amos, 
Ron Ferrucci and Lilien Vogl. In 2006, OHS 
board members Jerry Abrams, Enoch, 
Haine, Penisten and Wolfberg supported 
my idea of shifting Hindsight from 
newsletter to journal format.

Until 2017, Hindsight was printed 
at, and mailed from, the Indiana 
University campus in Bloomington. 
Indiana University School of Optometry 
secretarial staff, particularly Terri Greene 
and Cheryl Oldfield, worked with the 
campus printing office and mailed copies 
of Hindsight to OHS members. My wife 
Diane has helped prepare images for 
publication for many years and she drew 
an OHS logo that we used on the cover of 
Hindsight from 2007 to 2012.

In 2013, we were pleased to start 
working with IUScholarWorks, Indiana 
University’s digital repository and online 
journal platform. They digitized all 
back issues of the OHS newsletter and 
Hindsight as PDF files and deposited them 
online. In 2015, Hindsight became one 
of IUScholarWorks’ online journals with 
current issues published on their website.

The association with IUScholarWorks 
has made it possible to track the numbers 
of online views of Hindsight articles. That 
number has increased from when that 
data first became available in 2019 to a 
total of 14,982 in 2023. 

Soon after Kirsten Hébert’s hiring as 
the Archives and Museum of Optometry 
Heritage Services specialist, she became 
an integral part of OHS and made 
contributions to Hindsight. In 2014 she 
started publishing articles in Hindsight. 
She worked with IUScholarWorks 
to improve the functionality of the 
online version of Hindsight, and in 
2017, she arranged for layout and 
printing of Hindsight to be done at the 
American Optometric Association (AOA) 
headquarters. Chris Martin, AOA’s Graphic 
Production specialist, designed a visually 
pleasing layout. Since Hébert’s departure 
from the AOA, Molly Brown and the AOA 
staff have been essential to Hindsight’s 
success.  

I was fortunate to have skilled and 
prolific writers to serve as contributing 
editors. Enoch started writing for 
Hindsight when it was a newsletter and 
continued doing so after we went to a 
journal format, a total of 45 articles in 
all. Bennett contributed 27 articles and 
Hébert 18. John Amos has contributed 12 
articles so far.

In 2018, we started publishing 
occasional theme issues. OHS Committee 
members have suggested topics, 
recommended and contacted potential 
authors, and reviewed and wrote papers. I 
would like to mention Ray Myers as being 
particularly involved in each of those 
functions. OHS Committee members who 
wrote papers for theme issues are Ray 
Myers, Ferrucci, Carol Parker, Linda Casser, 
Lynn Brandes, Heather Edmonds, Viktoria 
Davis, Vogl and Howard McAlister.

Thanks also go to reviewers and 
authors over the years. Since the switch 

to journal format in 2007, we have had 
more than 100 different authors and 
co-authors. The majority of our authors 
have been American optometrists, but 
we also have had authors from Australia, 
Canada, the United Kingdom, Poland, 
Hong Kong, India, Iran, South Africa and 
Taiwan. In addition to optometrists, our 
authors have included vision scientists, 
ophthalmologists, archives and museum 
professionals, librarians, optometry 
administrative personnel, optometry 
students an optometrist’s spouse, an 
English professor and an independent 
researcher.    

The 53 volumes of the OHS newsletter 
and Hindsight from 1970 to 2023 now 
comprise more than 3,700 pages of 
information on optometry history. When 
I have an optometry history question, 
the first place I look is in those pages.3 I 
am very happy to have played a role in 
documenting what Hofstetter described 
as optometry’s “truly proud history.”4  

REFERENCES

1. Goss DA. 20/20 hindsight: A history 
of the Optometric Historical Society 
as chronicled in its newsletter 
and journal. Hindsight: J Optom 
Hist. 2019;50:4-12.

2. Goss DA. OHS co-founder Henry 
Hofstetter (1914-2002). Hindsight: J 
Optom Hist. 2019;50:29-34.

3. Interspersed with the back issues 
of Hindsight on IUScholarWorks are 
indexes for volumes 1-10, 11-20, 21-
30, and 31-40. They can be found by 
scrolling down through back issues 
on the Hindsight Archives webpage: 
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/
index.php/hindsight/issue/archives. 

4. Hofstetter HW. The OHS mission. 
Hindsight. 1996;27:17-18.

EDITORIAL DAVID A. GOSS, O.D., PHD