It’s the question that keeps America up at night: why the hipster glasses, Rick Perry?
In an interview with the National Journal, the four-eyed governor of Texas discussed the childhood accident that has led him to wear his now trademark rims.
It all started in 1967, when Perry was still a senior in high school and his best friend threw a rock across the football field. It hit Perry’s eye. There was blood and a complete loss of vision in the damaged eye.
But somehow, over the next month, his eyesight came back. So much so, that after he graduated high school and joined the United States Air Force, he had 20/20 vision.
“My eye miraculously was healed,” he says. “I don’t know why.”
But then several decades elapsed—in which Perry served as governor of Texas for multiple terms and ran unsuccessfully for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. It was after his failed presidential run that, sitting in his office in the State Capital one night, he noticed that the air vents running along the wall looked crooked. He went to an eye-doctor who told him he had pre-retinal fibrosis.
“For a layman,” Perry told the National Journal, “what that is—that injury that occurred 45 years ago was starting to manifest itself.”
The option was to either have a surgery or wear glasses. Perry chose glasses. His wife, Anita, chose the thick, black frames.
And so Americans can now sleep soundly—or at least move on to pondering George H.W. Bush’s passion for patterned socks.
Read the full 700-word story behind the glasses straight out of Perry’s mouth at the National Journal.
