BY ANN WLAZELEK AND FRANK WIESE

By ANN WLAZELEKand FRANK WIESE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- Joe LeGrand Jr. idles his paintbrush and examines the well-worn stuffed animal the bespectacled young girl is clutching.
It is the same floppy, pink piece of security 7-year-old Katelyn Wrench has clung to since a fast-growing cancerous tumor forced surgeons to remove her right eye.
"PIGGIE needs a new eye too," she tells the fatherly figure painting a brown iris on a small plastic disc. "His fur is covering his eye. He's starting to look old."
The soft-spoken technician begs to differ.
"PIGGIE has two eyes," he tells her. "Maybe he can get one on your next visit."
For the precocious second-grader who adores animals and professes to own more than 100 stuffed varieties, LeGrand's suggestion bolsters her spirits and calms her fears for the long day ahead.
It will take LeGrand seven hours to make a new right eye for the youngster from Waverly, N.Y. Katelyn and her mother, Karol Moore-Wrench, already have spent 31/2 hours on the road getting to the Fullerton, Pa., optometrist's office, where LeGrand works. And, they must make the return trip at the end of the day.
LeGrand, 47, also travels. Every Thursday for the past year, he has come to Fullerton from his home and family-run business, LeGrand Associates, in the Philadelphia area to serve Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley and surrounding areas. He makes eyes almost every day for people who lose them to disease, defect and injury.
To the fascination of the young girl and her mother, LeGrand does most of his work in front of their eyes -- and the handful of fake ones that rest on his desk.
His tools appear ordinary: paints, brushes, plastic solvents, an alcohol torch.
Yet, Katelyn watches intently from a wooden chair beside the desk as LeGrand begins with a small wax form.
LeGrand's work
LeGrand is not a doctor. He is an ocularist, a maker of prosthetic eyes. There are only about 200 like him in the country.
Although he holds a bachelor's degree in business administration, LeGrand learned the trade from his father, who learned from the ocularist who made the elder LeGrand an artificial eye.
That's how most ocularists get started, the younger LeGrand explains. They either inherit the family business or need the service.
With a curved knife in hand, LeGrand gently shaves away the rough edges on the wax form to fit like a thick contact lens over an implant in Katelyn's eye socket.
Many patients express surprise that the eyes he makes are not egg-shaped, like an eyeball. If such a prosthetic ever existed, LeGrand tells them, he's never seen one.
Katelyn and her mother know better. LeGrand made the girl's first artificial eye weeks after her cancer surgery, when she was 4. He was referred to the family by the surgeons.
Katelyn doesn't remember that visit, or the trauma her parents endured the day they found out their youngest daughter had a rare tumor, called retinoblastoma, that had to be removed right away.
However, she's come to know LeGrand from follow-up visits every six months. LeGrand would joke around with the talkative tot while cleaning, sanding or rebuilding her eye. Now, Katelyn is getting a new, chocolate brown prosthesis for the hazel one she has outgrown. The color and size of her normal eye has changed.
The right fit
Self-conscious once LeGrand removes the old prosthesis, she covers her right eye with her hand. Soon, however, she forgets her modesty and becomes mesmerized as LeGrand heats a small, black, metal "button" on a stick that will represent her iris and pupil. The metal melts the wax and sticks fast to the form.
LeGrand tries the wax form in Katelyn's orbit to make sure it fits comfortably on her implant. He checks the location, size and position of the button several times and reheats the metal for the slightest adjustment.
Satisfied with Katelyn's wax form, LeGrand removes the button, makes a hole and inserts a plastic tube.
The tube allows him to inject a quick-setting liquid through the wax and against Katelyn's implant to create a perfect impression for her prosthesis.
Katelyn cries as LeGrand squirts the cool, wet liquid called algenate into her eye. As is supposed to happen, some of the liquid spills out of the tube onto her cheek.
"It hurts! It hurts!" she yells, squeezing PIGGIE under her arm. Her mother clutches her hand to comfort her.
LeGrand says, "OK, it will only be in for one minute."
He quickly removes the wax form and the pink algenate behind it. The liquid is now a spongy solid, similar in consistency to a hard-boiled egg white.
"Good," he says, to Katelyn's relief. "Slap me five!"
The ponytailed pixie obeys. LeGrand catches the hand and doesn't let go, transforming tears into laughter.
Katelyn, who excels at spelling and insists that PIGGIE is spelled with all capital letters, challenges the practitioner.
"How do you spell 'hug' backwards," she asks.
LeGrand plays along. "G-U-H," he says.
"Guh!" she utters, tickled by the funny sound.
"Guh!" LeGrand repeats, laughing too.
Getting tired
In a back room, LeGrand makes a plaster casting around the algenate and wax form. Then, he chooses a new button to become the iris, the colored part of an eye, that contains a pre-painted black dot for the pupil.
With a lathe and razor blade, he shaves the dot to the proper diameter. Then, he starts to paint. It's a skill he's honed over 25 years.
Katelyn sits patiently as LeGrand painstakingly adds strokes of orange, red and brown to the back of the button. After each application, he holds it up next to Katelyn's left eye for comparison.
Tiring, Katelyn rests her chin on his desk.
When he's finished, LeGrand puts the button into the proper place in the casting, mixes the plastics that will become the sclera, or white of the eye, and puts it into the mold.
Pressure from a vice and heat from boiling water in an enamel pot cure the plastic, making it nearly impossible to break.
LeGrand tells the Wrenches the cooking will take at least 60 minutes, so Katelyn and her mother escape the office for the first time in hours.
Katelyn, who studies gymnastics to compensate for her lack of depth perception, easily turns a cartwheel in the front lawn and jumps to pull leaves off a tree.
Karol Moore-Wrench had promised her daughter a stuffed animal if she behaved. She makes good on the promise at a local toy store. Katelyn chooses the brightest specimen on the shelves, an orange iguana with bug-eyes.
Final touches
By the time they return to the optometry office, LeGrand has removed Katelyn's artificial eye from the casting and sanded its rough edges for a final painting.
Katelyn's energy is waning, but she pays attention when LeGrand adds faint blue strokes to the white of her eye, representing tiny veins. Her mother is intrigued by the wisps of red embroidery thread he shaves off and glues in place to create three-dimensional arteries.
In a signature move, LeGrand uses red pencil to date the top of the piece "04."
The eye is ready for its clear plastic coating, or corneal layer.
Back in the enamel pot, the eye cooks for another hour. Katelyn falls asleep in her chair.
All finished
When the finished product emerges, LeGrand sands and polishes once more, adding a high-gloss buff. The $2,000 price tag is covered by most insurers. He holds out the eye for Katelyn to examine.
She wanted two different-colored eyes, like those of a cat in her neighborhood, but nods in approval.
Inserted over the implant, the new brown eye looks back at LeGrand as a near mirror image of the left. Because it fits over her implant, the artificial eye moves in concert with the left.
Touching her daughter's forehead to check the result, Karol Moore-Wrench is amazed at how real the prosthesis looks. Katelyn, who's had enough for one day, sticks out her tongue.