News & Stories

On September 13, 2025, Iowa Lions Eye Bank marked its 70th anniversary with the Strikes for Sight fundraiser at Colonial Lanes in Iowa City. The event honored decades of sight-saving work and featured a powerful simulation of Fuchs Dystrophy, allowing attendees to experience vision loss firsthand.

Dave McGlaughlin says he picked his wife, Jeanna, out of a catalog. “We both worked at West Music at the same time,” Dave says. “Every year, the music education department published a catalog of all the bongos, maracas and stuff they sold to universities and schools, and they always had pictures of the staff.” Dave worked at the West Music in Waterloo at the time, while Jeanna worked at the Coralville location. He says he thought Jeanna looked cute in her picture in the catalog. “I knew she was the one,” Dave says.

Keith Algreen was 11 years old and had just started the sixth grade in the fall of 1986. He was not a big guy, “…four foot eight and weighed all of 80 pounds wet,” says his mother, Marilyn. He was making plans to invite his friend, Jodi, to dance with him at the school’s fall celebration, and planned to tell her it was because he was the shortest in the class and she was the tallest.

Some glaucoma tube shunt surgeries utilize corneal tissue recovered, evaluated, and distributed by Iowa Lions Eye Bank

Tyler McKinney was a junior and the starting point guard for Creighton University’s men’s basketball team in late 2003 when he was sidelined with an eye infection called acanthamoeba keratitis. McKinney isn’t sure how he contracted the infection in his right eye, but his best guess is that it happened when he was in Canada during a preseason basketball trip.

07/20/1959 - 05/22/2024

05/13/2002 - 05/16/2024

08/14/1964 - 03/28/2025

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04/12/1983 - 05/31/2021