Baby boomers have eyes on glasses and bifocals

I have seen my future, and it includes bifocals and reading glasses.

I am a boomer - short for baby boomer, as in that huge postwar population born between 1946 and 1965. These days, "boomer" is rarely a stand-alone term for me and my demographic brethren; there's usually a cute modifier attached - say, "aging," or "graying," as in: "The graying boomer population is starting to take the Social Security issue very seriously."

Here's another issue we graying/decomposing boomers are increasingly concerned about: eye care. We are taking a long, hard squint at that one, although to tell you the truth, many of us are taking a long, hard squint at just about everything these days.

You see, one of the various swift kicks to the keister that Father Time delivers to those entering middle age is presbyopia, which is not a religion but refers to your eyes' inability to focus on very close objects, because of your eye lens' increasing inflexibility. It starts in your 40s. It gets worse. And there isn't a thing you can do about it (laser surgery can't fix it) - except start picking out bifocals if you already wear glasses, or reading glasses if you don't.

For those who choose reading glasses, there are two problems. One, off-the-rack readers may not reflect, shall we say, your sense of style. Two, reading glasses are never where you need them. You forget to pack them on trips. You forget to bring them to restaurants, and are reduced to reading the menu, votive candle in hand, like Indiana Jones peering at a treasure map.

"I would fly somewhere on business, leave my reading glasses on the plane, and be stuck in a hotel room with an 8 a.m. presentation to prepare for," says Peggy O'Keefe, a card-carrying (but apparently not yet graying) boomer in Deerfield, Ill. "It was just so frustrating. And I thought, `I can't be the only one.' "

Only one? Hardly. One certainty about being a boomer is that you always have lots of company. Some 4.7 million people will turn 40 this year, swelling the fortysomething population to 42.6 million, according to U.S. News & World Report. And 74 percent of fortysomethings wear glasses.

And so O'Keefe got into the reading-glasses business, focusing not on sales to boomers, but on places where boomers like to play. GuestSpecs markets its glasses to restaurants, hotels, cruise lines, resorts - anyplace whose customers might have a sudden, powerful need for a little extra magnification. O'Keefe's specs come in three models.

The Mini Readers are the stars of the GuestSpecs line - tiny, half-inch-wide metallic frames available in more than a half-dozen colors. Perch the frames on your nose and you look like a Gucci-outfitted Ben Franklin. You wouldn't want to pore through a 50-page contract with them, but for scanning the fine print on a wine list, mini readers are perfect. Suggested retail is about $25.

Full Readers and Sun Readers are identical, except that the Sun Readers have UV-protected lenses. The full-size glasses are larger, though you can peer over them to see long distances, and have sturdy acrylic frames in black and tortoise. Full Readers cost about $15, Sun Readers $18.

O'Keefe didn't discuss sales figures, but GuestSpecs was a hit at last month's National Restaurant Association show in Chicago, selected as the show's Best New Non-Food Product. Traffic on O'Keefe's Web site - www.guestspecs.com - has been encouraging.

"This is a growing need for the hospitality industry to address," says O'Keefe, who envisions a day in which restaurants routinely stock reading glasses to lend to customers and GuestSpecs are standard items in business-hotel mini-bars.